


The Price

by alchemystique



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-10-06 10:59:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 44,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10333166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alchemystique/pseuds/alchemystique
Summary: Killian Jones has no desire to return to Misthaven, but his captain and his crew are tied to the kingdom in a way he has never understood, and they consider it a duty to be there for the Choosing. Once every fifteen years, the witch in her high tower chooses a man or woman among them and whisks them away, in payment for all she has done to save this kingdom, and to most it is considered a blessing to be chosen. All Killian wants is for the Choosing to be finished and The Jewel to return to sea, and to forget once again all that Misthaven has taken from him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> apparently my muse is still alive and kicking, it just likes to spend almost an entire year dormant before doing me a solid. this is heavily inspired by ‘uprooted’ my naomi novik, but it’s completely unnecessary to know anything at all about it, though you should definitely read it and cry about it with me.

There was a hum of quiet anticipation hanging over the bay when The Jewel of the Realm docked in port, despite the teeming masses of ships, boats and dingys all huddled in together - and Killian sighed as he surveyed the place. He’d been too young to really remember the last Choosing, but Liam had woven him grand stories of it - of the mass of people who returned to their homeland, of the ceremony and the excitement bubbling among the residents of this land, of the tense wonder of the people as they waited to see who would be chosen from their ranks. Killian, for his part, didn’t understand it. He’d spent so little time ashore in this kingdom, he could hardly understand why this day, this day that happened once every fifteen years, was so important to the people of Misthaven.

Liam, for all his stories of the land they’d been born in, had no way of explaining the importance of this day. His own memories of growing up amidst the sailors and pirates who frequented their mothers inn while on land were more emotion than anything else, and no matter the tales Liam spun of the place he remembered so fondly, Killian had never quite understood what he meant when he called the place home. 

To Killian it was nothing more than a place to resupply. 

It was meant to be an honor, being chosen, the greatest honor a man or woman of Misthaven could receive, but for himself, it seemed more like imprisonment.

“Who d’you think it’ll be, this time?”

Killian bit out a sigh, turning to give their quartermaster an unimpressed look. They’d only returned for fear the crew might mutiny if not given the chance to be among those the Swan could choose from - despite an understanding among the crew that of anyone in Misthaven, these merchant sailors were some of the least likely to be chosen in the entire realm, there was a feeling among most of them that even the dream of a chance would be enough. At the very least, they wanted a story to tell, desired that bit of genuine truth to the tales they spun in taverns and whorehouses across the world. The Choosing, they imagined, would make for a larger than life story.

“I’d just as soon cut off my own hand as make idle speculations about what sort of person an immortal sorceress prefers for a servant, Turk. The sooner it’s done and we’re on our way, the better, I say.”

Turk, for his own part, seemed scandalized by the insinuation that the Chosen were merely servants, but Killian had never been led to believe otherwise. Those few who spent their years with the Swan rarely ever spoke of them, and though they never said a single derogatory thing about the witch in her high tower, they never spoke a kind word, either.

“Oh come, you can’t truly believe there’s some greater importance to this ridiculous event, can you? The witch comes down from her throne once every fifteen years and chooses a strapping young lady or gentlemen with nothing much to recommend them, and it’s a blessing to a tired father who despaired of ever marrying off his daughter, a burden released from a mother of too many children. You call it a blessing, and I call it indentured service.”

“Shouldn’t call her that,” Turk intones quietly, glancing furtively around him as though terrified the woman herself will appear out of thin air, materializing amidst the barrels of spices The Jewel has brought to sell. “And if it ain’t some kind of important, why’s it only ever the one, eh? She’s got enough power, why don’t she just descend on some village and take off with the whole lot of ‘em?”

It’s a question Killian has no desire to answer, and so he doesn’t.

“You should join the crew ashore, Turk. Enjoy your gossip and revelry in the tavern for the night, for tomorrow she’ll choose herself a companion and the rest of us will return to life as normal, and it won’t be a single one of you she chooses. Perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to have known the poor bastard she picks.”

“She’s chosen a man of the sea before, y’know. Nigh on a hundred years it’s been - might be time for another.”

“Well I’ve no desire to take on new crew here, so you had all better pray it’s not one of you.”

The man merely frowns at him before he turns away, and Killian returns to glaring dourly at the shoreline, where tents are being pitched and the growing anticipation in the air hangs over them all like a dark cloud.

He has no desire to be here, not in this place that only ever took from him. He longs for the sea already, for open ocean and steady wind. He’d long ago given up glory, but at least out at sea he has a purpose, a place.

Here there is only the steady march toward uselessness, the inevitable decay of life. 

Tonight, the Swan will slide hidden into the crowds of people awaiting her decision, and from them she will find a man or woman silly enough to suit her tastes, and tomorrow Killian will watch his crews disappointment as she returns to her lair, with the knowledge that at the next Choosing, he will be far too old to be even a consideration. And with any luck, a fortnight after that, he will be back at sea, and after a month or two, the crew will forget all about the Swan of Misthaven.

\------

He means to spend the evening aboard the ship, but as the sun sets over the bay, he finds himself being cajoled into a rowboat by Liam and dragged across the beach to an encampment of men the elder Jones had sailed with years ago. 

While his brother joins in the merriment of the crew, who all remember him fondly, and wish to celebrate both the day and their friends ascension through the ranks to captaincy, Killian stews over his meal. He’d told Liam this was all a waste of time, that Arendelle would pay twice as much for the spices in their hold, but his brother had been insistent that they attend to their duties - they’d been born in Misthaven, raised under the light of its prosperity, and it was only fair they paid homage to the sorceress who secured that peace, or so Liam said.

He had a foggy memory, when it came to their childhood, or at least the part Killian had been a part of. His brother was ten years his senior, and his recollection of this place was perhaps more happy than Killian’s own.

But Killian remembered the sickness that had taken his mother, her loss like a missing limb, he recalled the way it had felt when their father vanished, remembered scrounging for scraps and most of all he remembered what it felt like to be stripped of his freedom, to be forced to work for awful men and to be beholden to the moods of masters. 

Laughter broke out not far off from Killian, and he watched his brothers grin widen as he shovelled a pile of mismatched trinkets into his ever growing pile of winnings. If he looked closely, he was sure he’d find his brothers very own set of ivory die being used atop the upturned crate masquerading as a table - a pair Killian himself had bought his brother in a fit of pique, knowing his honorable brother would find no pleasure in cheating a man in a gamble. And yet, despite making a show of tossing the damn things at Killian’s head, they’d managed to find their  way into Liam’s coat pocket on many an occasion, and they’d swindled plenty of even less honorable men out of coin before. He couldn’t imagine why his brother would be using them now, but Killian had made himself something of an outcast in this group, and attempting to slink into their ranks now would arouse suspicion.

His disposition only darkened as the exuberant crowd around him broke into song, and all along the beach others joined in, until the melody overpowered every sense - he’d been seven the last time he heard this song, crying in the dark as his mother faded, and still she’d hummed brokenly along as the people in the tavern below bellowed the tune.

Across all of Misthaven this song was being sung, and to most of them it was a near sacred melody, the song of the Swan, who saved the realm and offered its people prosperity in return for one of their own, once every fifteen years. 

To Killian, it was a reminder not of gain, but of loss.

Not halfway through it, Killian had had enough. Gathering up the bottle of rum he’d hardly touched, and avoiding his brother’s gaze as Liam threw an arm around the shoulders of his neighbor, he darted away toward the treeline, and cut across the dark edges of the forest in search of some peace and quiet.

He slowed his pace only when the sounds from the beach were overtaken by the soft lapping of waves. He’d reached an empty cove, too small for a ship to weigh anchor and thoroughly unoccupied, and with a small sigh of relief he pressed out into the sand again, leaving behind the quiet whisper of the trees. The moon was high tonight, a fact for which Killian was grateful for - he’d spent the better part of his hike taking great gulps of his rum, and the moon provided the only light along the shoreline, now that he’d wandered so far from the firelight of the camps.

His steps were far more careful than usual as he climbed down a rocky outcropping to reach the sanded shore of the cove, but when he reached the sand he lost his studied air, shucking off his boots to let his flesh sink first into sand and then the crisp cool waters of the low tide. There was a vague, niggling memory of his mother, here, of her admonition the first time he and Liam had dragged each other home from the beach after dark, sopping wet and freezing, too giddy with their own small rebellion to care as they dripped onto the floor while mother bundled them in blankets and sat them before the fire.

It was a warm memory, and Killian settled softly into the sand, the bottle of rum - significantly less full now than it had been earlier - tucked against his side. 

Off in the distance, Killian could see a number of boats anchored a mile or so out, and felt a desperate pang to be aboard one of them - any, really, would do - to feel the sway of the ocean beneath his feet, where he was far steadier than he’d ever been on dry land; to see land fall away and hear the wind catch the slack of a sail. 

He let himself be carried off for a while by the sight of the bobbing lanterns far out, let his mind wander to far more pleasant things than this wretched spit of land Liam still sometimes called home, and so he could hardly be blamed for letting his heart be calmed by the gentle sound of water slipping over the beach, for letting his eyes dip closed as he slid his head to the pillow of the sand below.

He couldn’t tell how long it had been since he dozed off, but when he opened his eyes again he knew instantly that something was off. The light of the moon should have dimmed by now, as it slipped further inland, but instead there was an odd, bright light filtering through the semi-circle of the cove. 

The bottle of rum beside him was empty, and though Killian couldn’t remember drinking it all, the only logical conclusion was that he’d finished it off. A dream, perhaps, or a hallucination -  there was every possibility he’d stumbled across some plant along the edges of the forest that sapped the sanity temporarily from a man, and as he blinked and sat up his theory seemed confirmed. 

There was a woman by the edge of the water, and it was from her that this mysterious light seemed to come from, glowing as though from inside her skin. Killian shook his head, trying vainly to clear the cobwebs, but as he continued too stare he took note that the fish tail he’d been sure was a trick of the light was, indeed, nothing of the sort.

She smiled, and though Killian knew he should find solace in this charming grin, knew without having to think that it was meant solely for him, something in it felt off. It was a trick, and no amount of rum or Misthaven weeds could convince him otherwise. 

Though he knew she was beautiful, if asked to describe her he wasn’t sure he could bring up a single feature to explain what she looked like - not the color of her hair or the curve of her jaw, not the shape of her eyes or the twist of her lip. The grin fell from her face as he reached for the dagger at his belt. “Are you frightened of me?” the creature asked, her head tilting to the side in careful study as he scrambled inelegantly to his feet. The rum, as ever, was both his warmest friend and his greatest enemy.

“Frightened? No. I find myself unwilling to place too much trust in a creature of magic.”

She laughed, amused by something other than his quiet tension, and the sound should have been magical - indeed he felt, and fought, the sense of calm that washed over him at the tinkling of her voice. “I wish you no harm, sailor.”

“Forgive me if I don’t take a siren at her word.”

The grin widened, her lips nearly cracking with glee, and there he could see it, hidden under the surface of her soft face and the bright light around her - darkness, inky black and desperate to break free. “Is that what you see? Interesting.”

“And what am I meant to see?”

The beast raised her arms out from her sides, twisting, and for a moment it seemed to Killian as though she were sprouting wings, the shimmering image of white feathers billowing out around her - a blink and they were gone, as she twisted from side to side. “Whatever you want to see,” she told him, but as she looked at him now her eyes flashed, and there was something pointed in the turn of her lip, beaklike for a moment before the image of the siren returned.  
  


“I’m dreaming,” he spoke aloud, just to remind himself of the fact, and again, the shimmering image of her darkened. 

“Perhaps you are. Perhaps not. It makes no real difference. Though if you are, I have to wonder why your mind has conjured me up.”

“A reminder not to trust this land, not to fall victim to it’s trickery.”

“A fine theory. Allow me to submit a counterpoint?”

“My dream. If I tell you no, and you go away, then it doesn’t matter. If I tell you no and you respond anyway, I suppose I must want to hear it.”

“You’ve a strange mind.”

“Say your piece and leave me be.” Whatever this dream was meant to be, Killian wanted it to be done. 

“If this is a dream, perhaps you see me for a different reason. Perhaps your mind is trying to remind you of the magic you alone among your fellows is able to see. And if it’s not a dream… well. The same logic applies.”

“My men have seen creatures far more terrifying than you.”

“Oh, I’m certain they have. But what do you see? To them, I’m as you say - a creature sent to lure them to their deaths, a beast with a handsome face. But you see something else, don’t you?”

Killian desperately wished he could say no, but the feathers of the wings, furled tight now against her back, were gleaming in the unnatural bright blue light, and the whites of her eyes were fading into corners, a swirling darkness taking it’s place.

“What is it, exactly, that you see, Killian?” the beast wondered, and for all that he’d convinced himself this was a dream, he felt a chill at the idea that she knew his name. 

“I see all this place has ever shown me. A pretty lie, a beautiful wrapping, and beneath it nothing but loss.”

This was apparently all the beast needed. Her grin faded as she took him in, careful and considering, a hint of annoyance snapping across her features before her expression became neutral, and without another word, she slid away from him. In the fading light, Killian watched her go, his eyes struggling to keep track of the tail sliding into the water, unable to make sense of why one moment he saw scales, the next a jut of feathers, and then both the beast and the light were gone.

Killian woke to the sun blazing against his face, the tide at his knees, and a finger of rum left in his bottle, the dream still vivid in his mind, more real than memory. The cove was quiet and empty, still, and if he had to guess, it was close to midday. His body felt rested but his mind still teemed with exhaustion, and without a care for the way it would look to his brother, Killian downed the last of the rum before he stood. 

There was an inkling of memory, of the rum having been gone the night before, but that seemed reason enough to believe it had all been a dream. 

Before he left, he took one last look to the edge of the beach where he’d dreamed up the creature the night before, and though the spot where she’d lain had by now been wiped away by the water, he could see no sign of her having ever been there.

****

A dream, he reminded himself, and set off to meet his brother. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Swan makes a decision.

When Killian had been a young boy, he’d found himself often at odds with the world around him. Or at least, that was how Liam told it. 

He was too young to remember it all, or even most of it, really, but to Killian Jones, the world had been the tavern, and the town surrounding them, the sea before them, but it had been more. His mother had called him fantastical, whimsical, when he brought home strange flowers she’d never seen before, and told her stories of faeries and goblins and beasts with kind eyes. 

The rest of the village hadn’t been quite as kind.

He’d been so young he could barely remember their faces, but the taunts, the jeers, the whispers of the mad Jones boy they never bothered to keep silent when he wandered by, those memories remained. 

He remembered only one instance of true danger, in all that time. The beasties and ghouls he’d weaved stories of were long gone to his memory, but this one moment in time stayed etched in his mind.

The flowers he’d returned from the woods at the edge of the forest sat neatly in the cup his mother had put them in, sunlight drifting in from the window, bathing them in warm light on the ledge on which they sat, and Killian was quiet as he leafed through the book father had brought back from this fair or that cart. He’d only just begun to make sense of the symbols upon the page, and he’d whispered them quietly, hoping father wouldn’t hear his jumpy mutterings from where he sat beside the kitchen.

It had been a terribly warm day, but his mother had been insistent on cooking a hearty meal, and so the fire in the stove drove the heat in their cottage to a near unbearable level, and as Killian shifted, he’d felt the drip of sweat down the back of his neck.

Mother and father were speaking in quiet voices, too quiet for Killian to pick up on the words, only the tone of the conversation - an unhappy one, and Killian hoped for his brothers speedy return from his errands in town if only to help keep the peace. He much preferred when father was gone.

The book was far more advanced than Killian was truly prepared for - words he’d never seen popping out here and there, phrases that held no meaning to him, a full story of things he couldn’t begin to understand, but still he struggled through the letters one by one, wishing father weren’t there so that he could ask mother what the words meant, flinching every once in a while when the voices across the room from him became momentarily loud and clipped before returning to a whisper.

They’d spent the afternoon thus, tense and uncomfortable, the heat barely tolerable, the tension stifling, the book straining Killian’s eyes as he struggled to let it take him far away from the entire situation.

He’d just skittered to a halt over the word ‘rapscallion’ when his fathers voice rose above the din, and he’d looked up blearily only to feel the room spinning around him, and father stalking towards the sill where the flowers he’d presented so eagerly only that morning sat. 

“What in _gods_ name are these doing here?”

“Brennan, please, they’re just a few flowers.”

He’d turned to look at her with an expression so incredulous Killian had felt like cowering, but something dark and eerie had settled behind his fathers gaze, something that made Killian creep forward, away from the book, to stand between his mother and the demon lurking in the shadows behind eyes so much like his own.

“Did _he_ bring you these?”

There was accusation in his voice, and at the time it had been nothing but fuel to fire Killian’s dislike of the man who visited them only just often enough to call this place home, but looking back, he was certain his father hadn’t meant Killian himself.

“I brought them!” 

He barely came to his fathers hip, then, and it had felt like the bravest three words he’d ever spoken. Brennan had leveled him with a dark look.

“Did she tell you to say that, boy?”

There was a dark anger in his voice, but Killian had been too angry to care, indignation at being called a liar making him stand taller, his whole head tilted up to stare right back. 

“ _I_ found them. I found them in the forest, and I brought them home for mother.”

But Brennan Jones had turned his focus away from him already, spinning to his wife. “Haven’t you the sense to tell the boy what he’s wandered across and burn it in the fire? Or did I truly marry a damn fool?”

His mother, usually so timid in her interactions with Brennan, tilted her chin and stuck him with a look that would have cowered Killian. “It’s a silly superstition. They’re harmless.”

But Killian wasn’t so sure. The room was still hot, but he felt light headed and queasy, now, the room spinning where he stood, and no amount of muggy air could explain the strange shadows leaping under his fathers skin. 

“ _Harmless_? It’s killed plenty an idiot before, darling, don’t think you’re somehow above it.”

Killian had felt an anger wash over him like nothing before, or for a long time after, and mother and father had begun to shout at each other, loud, angry voices jumping back and forth over Killian’s head. The room began to spin more wildly, and Killian had felt like screaming.

He would have, too, a righteous tantrum coming on, but mother had clutched the edge of a chair, the color draining from her face, just as the door swung open and Liam entered.

Sunlight and cool air drifted in on a breeze, and Killian had blinked, breathing it in.

He’d dashed across the room before his brother could say a word, snatched the flowers from their cup of water, and torn towards the door, hefting them with all the might of his six years, beyond the hedges and into the twilight.

It was only years later that Killian had discovered the plant again, though this one took on a different form, a different name. The flowers had been nightshade, a plant that had supposedly been eradicated from Misthaven in the Purge, hundreds of years before. In other realms, in slightly different arrangements, it had been called dreamshade.

When he’d learned of its uses - in brothels that used the plant to spice their drinks, in taverns half a world away where sailors whispered of the poisonous effects of the plant on a blade - he’d understood with perfect clarity exactly what he’d done. What he’d brought upon them. 

Darkness.

Death.

\------

He finds Liam bent low over a table, staring wistfully at the stew before him, as though trying to decide if it was worth it to raise his head to eat.

Killian claps him soundly on the back, grinning at his brother when all he receives in response is a low groan. It is a rare occasion to see his brother pulled so low by drink, and he enjoys it for a moment longer before waving over one of the bar maids. She smiles curiously at him, something familiar about her, but nothing Killian can easily remember, and so when she walks away to gather up a meal for him he tosses the feeling aside. 

“How are you faring this fine morning, Captain?”

“Fuck you,” comes the mumbled response. 

Killian clutches a hand to his heart, delighted. “Such language, and from a gentleman!”

His brother merely groans.

This, Killian decides, is a rare treat, and he means to fully enjoy it. With some prodding, he eventually manages to force a few spoonfuls of broth on his brother, and eats his own bowl in relative quiet, punctuating it every now and then with a far-too-cheery exclamation that makes Liam wince. It’s a fine stew, one of the few things Killian truly enjoys about his time ashore - Eucrates Cookson was the worst cook ever to enter a galley, and he is always grateful to eat a meal that doesn’t taste of black smoke and char. 

“Where did you wander off to last night, little brother?”

Killian supposes he deserves the dig for the torture he’d been enjoying through their meal. 

“Away.”

“Yes, I noticed.”

“Did you? You were enjoying swindling your former crewmates out of pointless trinkets all night. I hardly thought you’d notice.”

Liam sighs, lowering his head to a hand held up from the table by his elbow. He rubs slowly at his temples. “By the time we’d finished the song, you were long gone.”

Needing no reminders of it, he attempts to steer the conversation back to the curious case of his honorable brother conning old friends, but to no avail.

“You should be more careful to hide your disdain, brother. The Swan is important, to these people. Our people.”

“Your people, mayhap.”

His brother levels him with a look. It is an old argument, and one neither desires a rehash of. 

“I went for a walk. Wandered the beach. Drank up the rum and fell asleep.” He pauses, wondering if he ought to tell Liam about the strange dream. In the end, he decides against it - far better to put the memory of it aside for good.

“There’s been no word.”

Liam has lived through more than one Choosing, and knows the standard for the event, but Killian only knows that at some point within the day, the Swan will come to her decision, and some man or woman of Misthaven will be taken away to the castle far up in the hills where she resides. He’s never bothered to spend much time learning about the particulars.

“We should bring the barrels ashore when we’re done here. We’re much more likely to get a good price on them today, while everyone thinks their life is about to change.” 

His brother gives him a beleaguered glance, but Killian feels no guilt for suggesting they take advantage of the buyers in the bay. There is a small, petty part of him that wants to punish these people for putting their faith in the Swan.

“I’ve already spoken to Murtagh. We’ve agreed upon a payment. His men will offload them tomorrow, and after that he’ll have our next destination for us.”

Killian bites down on the disappointment - Murtagh is known to choose routes and destinations that provide the greatest profit - at the greatest risk to whomever he sends to retrieve his wares. The crew always finds a way to make themselves believe it is an sign of their own skill - Killian often spends his time thinking up inventive ways to tell the man to fuck off and just hire some pirates to do the job.

“And what, exactly, am I meant to do with my day then?”

“Join in the merriment, Killian. Enjoy yourself, for a change. Perhaps you could, if I may be so bold, have a little fun.”

Of the two of them, Liam was the one that commanded respect, the man to whom they looked to for hard decisions, but he was also the one more likely to tell a horrible joke, to break out in laughter, to grin behind the wheel of the ship as they caught a strong wind. Killian was far more prone to bouts of melancholy, and he preferred a scowl to a shrug, a smirk to a smile. Fun was hardly his main concern. His main concern was keeping his brother alive and well, and the crew after that. 

“I’m going back to the ship,” he tells Liam, and Liam merely sighs. 

“I thought you might.” His brother studies him carefully for a moment. “If you’re going to be there, you might as well do an inventory. We can resupply in the morning while we wait for Murtagh’s orders.”

He nods, standing, readying himself to leave, but something makes him pause, and as he passes by Liam he claps him on the shoulder, catching his brothers gaze, hoping somewhere in there he’s able to understand the apology in Killian’s eyes. 

Liam clasps his arm near the elbow, nodding swiftly. 

Later, he’ll wish he’d said more. Spent more time teasing his brother, laughing over his discomfort. He’ll wish he’d decided not to board the ship, that instead of wandering off the night before he’d stayed and joined in with the other men ashore. Later, he’ll wonder if isolating himself might have been the wrong decision, if spending more time with his crew and his brother might have prevented an undesired outcome. 

But that would be later. Now, he takes fast, eager strides down the length of the dock, and boards the ship, happily adjusting to the nearly indiscernible sway of the deck, and gathers up a log from the desk in the captain’s cabin.

He starts from the hold and works his way up to the deck, taking note of how low they’ve run on fresh water during their last trip, jotting down a reminder to talk to Liam about it before they embark. The creaking of the ship, the groan of the boards beneath his feet, the steady sound of the calm water surrounding him, all those things are a welcome respite, and he slips peacefully into a quiet rhythm, losing an hour or so before he makes it back into the sunlight above deck. 

He’s humming, quietly to himself, a sea shanty they’ve all sung a time or two, to frighten off a long storm, to pray for a strong wind, remembering the first time he’d sailed as Liam’s first mate - how happy he’d been, how proud to see them both alive and well, how he’d known, at that very moment, that the both of them were meant for great things.

It hadn’t turned out quite that way, in the end, but they lived their lives as free men, beholden to nothing and no one but the man paying for their services, and that was good enough for Killian.

The breeze was light, airy and fragrant, and Killian lifts his head to catch the scent, only to nearly reel back a moment later - it is a smell he is familiar with, flowery and bright, and one that has no place so far out from the mainland. 

He whips around at the sound of footsteps behind him, and blinks, trying to make sense of what he is seeing. There is a figure, there, suspended halfway between here and somewhere else, and as the image shimmers in and out of focus, it seems to him as though it were made up entirely of petals, full flowers blooming in the sunlight and fading back to buds, then pulsing back to life once more, the rhythm steady as his own heartbeat, until finally the source of it emerges like a shadow peeling itself up off the side of the mast. 

Killian stands his ground, unwilling to show fear despite his distaste of magic, and the woman who’d shimmered into existence tilts her head to take him in, annoyance in her own expression.

The gesture is horribly familiar, and Killian tries to ignore the memory of the siren the night before as she takes a few steps towards him, the heels of her strange boots echoing unpleasantly along the deck.

He’s never seen the Swan before, but he knows without having to ask that this is she. She seems almost to float, and though she’d appeared out of shadow and dust she seems more solid to him than anything he’s seen before, more real than any bit of his life has ever been.

He hates it, and her, more than ever.

Killian stares, taking in the neat line of her jaw and the shimmering texture of her skin, pale but nearly glittering in the bright light of the sun; her hair nearly white, pulled back and away from her face, bringing her profile into sharp relief - the high cut of her cheeks, the sharp edge of her nose, the curl of her lip, and he has but a moment of confusion before he realizes what, exactly, is happening.

The bells from the church begin to toll - the one nearest the shore, first, and then farther up the hill, another - the fort far atop the cliffs begin their own refrain, and Killian knows that all across the land more will follow suit.

The Swan has chosen.

A beat, and then she sighs, staring at him with that same disapproving frown she’s worn since she appeared, as though she hasn’t just charged into his life and ripped his existence apart at the seams. “You may be the first idiot in a hundred years to draw your weapon against me; _you’ve_ had the audacity to do it twice in less than a full day.” There is nothing admiring about the way she says it, but nothing threatening either, as though she finds the idea little more than a gnat to swat at.

It takes Killian a moment to realize what she means, but the understanding brings him no comfort. 

“The creature in the water. That was you.”

She hums, low in her throat, but it is not a pleasant sound. “Not a dream, unfortunately.”

He wants to scream, to rail at the heavens, to shimmer out of existence just as she’d entered it. Instead he straightens, tucking the sword in his hand back into his belt. Raising his head and pulling his shoulders back, he tries at an unconcerned air. “What happens now?”

She tosses an impatient look his way, as though she expects him to know the proper protocol for being spirited away by a powerful witch, away from his family and the only home he’s ever known. Finally, she flicks her hand carelessly through the air. 

“I will allow you time to say your goodbyes, and gather anything you cannot bear to be parted with.”

He will not give her the satisfaction of letting her know that the only thing he cannot bear to part with is the only thing she will be taking from him.

He has never considered this possibility. In all of his moaning and groaning, all of his attempts to fight their return to Misthaven, never in any of his arguments had he considered that he might be the one the Swan chose. And now, faced with it, he has gone a bit numb.

“And then?”

There is something in her gaze that makes him think he should feel like a ridiculous fool for asking the question, but he stares her down, unwilling to play the terror-struck man, or the idiot. “And then we leave.”

It is only now, as he considers how he will say his goodbyes to his brother, to this ship, to the sea - it is only now that he truly gives a thought for what the Swan must do with those she chooses. He’s only ever had a vague notion that they dusted her tables and perhaps served her meals, and he wonders now, why she is being vague in return. There is no one else to overhear them, and he will be in her service for the next fifteen years. Surely it would be easier on her just to tell him right away.

Perhaps it’s so terrible she thinks he’ll make a run for it, or try to strike her down. Both are unlikely - she’s one of the most powerful sorceresses this world has ever seen, and if he attempted either she would surely put a stop to it.

“If you’re quite done thinking of ways to run me through, we _are_ on a schedule.”

Killian forces himself not to react, staring at her carefully, trying to discern if she is just a good judge of facial expressions, or if she’d used some sort of magic to invade his mind.

“Both,” she tells him, straight faced and impatient. “Now, this brother of yours, let us find him so that you can -.”

“No.”

She stops dead in her tracks, having stalked half the distance between the two of them, and eyes him with sudden interest. “No?”

“It’s better if I don’t say goodbye.”

He cannot stand the idea of it - of making this real. Perhaps, if he writes a letter - she snorts at that, and Killian turns a hard glare on her that seems to amuse her - perhaps if he leaves Liam a note, it will be enough. 

Fifteen years, after all, is hardly a lifetime.

He ignores the woman entirely as he walks past her, and makes his way up the stairs to the hatch of the captain’s quarters. 

The room is quiet, and Killian tries to close off his mind, unwilling to share these final moments with the woman just outside it. Without knowing whether or not he is successful, he takes his time wandering the space - eyeing the books on the shelf near the windows, neat and orderly, running his fingers across the finely carved chest tucked into one of the walls behind the ladder, drinking in the sight of his brothers small, tight script, so unlike Killian’s own, on one of the logs laid out on his desk. Killian replaces the inventory list beside it.

Outside the window, ships are anchored in the harbor, the sun beating down on them, the ocean swaying below them, and Killian wonders when he will see anything like this again.

It is a sobering thought, and he turns back to the desk, pulling out a sheaf of clean parchment from one of the drawers, reaching for an inkwell and quill.

When he is done, he stares at the words laid out in a flourish on the page, so at odds with how confined he feels in this moment, his last breath of freedom.

He lays a sand dollar across it, swallowing against the memory of it - a gift he’d given to Liam the first time they’d been allowed ashore by Captain Silver. It makes a sick sort of sense, leaving that behind as his goodbye, really. 

When he returns to the deck she’s still there, leaning against the side of the ship, eyes taking in the bay curiously. She doesn’t turn to look at him right away, and for some reason, this irritates him. He makes a disapproving noise, low in his throat, tempted to reach for his sword again just to see what she’ll do. 

“I assumed you’d want a moment,” she tells him, gesturing vaguely at the ship, still not looking at him.

“I’ve said my goodbyes,” is all that he will give her, and she sighs, then, turning to him finally, the reflection of sunlight off the water bathing her in light that should warm her features. It didn’t.

“This will feel strange.” He means to ask her what, exactly, she is speaking of, but in one breath he is staring past her shoulder out to sea while she grasps at his arm, and the next he is gasping for breath, his stomach churning, the wood beneath him turned to stone as he tumbles knee-first into it, and a swirling cloud of unnatural smoke drifting away from them both.

He clutches at the wall beside him while she gives him an impatient look, dragging himself to a crouching position and still attempting to catch his breath. 

“You can find your rooms one flight up the stairs, and the kitchens down two. I will expect you in the library this evening. Do try to make yourself presentable, by then.” And with that she turns away from him, her steps echoing through the chamber she’d magicked them off to.

“Wait-.” It comes out more a wheeze than anything else, and Killian forces himself to stand, pulling air into his lungs. “That’s it?”

She huffs, swivelling on her heel to hold his gaze. “Usually my guests like to take their time parting ways with their life. We have departed...unexpectedly early.”

Taking another deep breath, he sends her a glare that would have scared a normal person half to death, but only makes her set her mouth in a fine line. “Oh, have I made a mess of your schedule? How _inconvenient_ of me.”

She grimaces, and Killian takes a very small amount of pleasure in the way her steps echo more loudly as she spins around and walks away from him, this time. 

It takes him another few minutes to catch his breath, the pressure against his chest slowly easing, and he vows never to allow her the pleasure of transporting him around like that again. After a time, leaning against the wall becomes unnecessary, and he pushes away from it, searching for the stairwell the Swan must have taken, eyes adjusting to the chamber lit by lanterns glowing without flame.

There is an archway, to his left, which seems the best option, and he is halfway there when the sunlight hits his face. 

He turns toward it, instead, wanting to catch a glimpse of all that still lives and breathes below him.

He’d have been better off staying in the musty shadows of the place. The tower he is in rests high above the rest of the castle, and as he looks out over meadows and forests, he feels a chill rising within him.

Below him lie valleys and hills, the forest encroaching on one side and a lake lying undisturbed on the other, green for miles and miles in every direction he can see from this viewpoint. He cannot catch even a glimpse of the sea, so far off in the distance it must be. 

Still feeling ill, and far more tired than the day should have made him, he turns away from the window without another glance, and heads toward the shadowy alcove he hopes leads to the stairs.

_Liam,_

_I am sure you will find comfort in knowing where I have gone, though I shall not. I have lived too long under your shadow, it seems, and must now make my way as the object of Misthaven gossip for a time. There is a certain irony in it, I suppose, and over time I may even grow to find it amusing._

_Do not be worried, I have no delusions of shaming you by refusing this ‘gift’ I have been given._

_Turk will make a fine First Mate, though he may be more lenient with the men than I have been in the past. Perhaps that is for the best._

_Take care, Liam, for I shall expect to see you unchanged when I am free. I have taken the liberty of borrowing mothers ring - though I know how dearly you treasure it, I could not think of any other thing I would like more to have with me._

_I would have followed you to the ends of the earth, brother._

_Killian_

_\------_


	3. Chapter 3

Killian has never had a room for himself. In the cottage near the edge of the forest, there’d been no separate spaces, only a cot by the window where he’d curled up to sleep, and on Silver’s ship he’d closed his eyes and rested to the sounds of a few dozen snoring men, often in the same cot as Liam - even aboard The Jewel he’d refused to let the men think there was any sort of favoritism being played (First Mate status notwithstanding) and he’d kept to the berth there, as well.  


The room he finds himself in is sprawling, extravagant, and so large he’s quite certain the Jewel would fit right inside of it.

It’s far too much space.

The door he’d closed behind him is sturdy and thick, with a heavy bolt to bar it shut, and a key besides to lock it up. It’s a small comfort to him, when he’s seen the Swan materialize out of nothing - surely there’s no lock that could keep her out, should she feel the need to be anywhere she pleases - and yet, it feels a bit like a promise. Of some small bit of privacy, at least, or an attempt to set boundaries.

Perhaps it was a peace offering, though Killian couldn’t imagine many of the other Chosen had felt as he did in this moment.

He returns his thoughts to the room, taking in the wide windows and the heavy curtains draping the walls beside them, the tapestries along the walls depicting scenes Liam might have been able to explain to him, but were lost to Killian- he’d never once taken the time to learn the history of Misthaven, too caught up in his desperate desire to explore the rest of the world instead. 

Off to his left there is an archway where another, smaller chamber houses what looks to be a small library - in the dim light he sees a few shelves of books, a small desk tucked into a corner, but there’s a fine layer of dust over everything, the musty smell of a room in disuse, and Killian realizes with a start that he has no knowledge of whomever had come before him. He couldn’t say whether it had been a man or a woman; a courtier or a peasant; a farmer or a merchant. There was nothing in these chambers that could tell him, either, no personal touches, no items left behind. To the right was a four poster bed, made neatly, and a trunk at the foot of it propped open and emptied. On both sides were small carved stands, devoid of decoration, and all about the room were scattered bits of finery - a large wooden table sitting before the windows, a chest against one wall, two separate wardrobes, empty shelves dotted here and there about the walls. It was as though someone had spent a small fortune creating a living, breathing space, and then left it, forgotten to time, without a single personal touch. 

Not a single lantern or candlestick decorates the room, the only light coming from the windows along the far side of the room.

Killian digs into the pocket of his vest, fingers grasping at the ring he’d tucked there before he’d left the ship, at the delicate metal work, and the small gem, taking comfort in it.

If he closes his eyes, he can imagine the fringes of her smile, and the quiet clarity of her laughter, the smell of the oils she pressed into the skin on the inside of her elbows and the hollow behind her ear.

Killian takes a deep breath, shucking off his jacket, and decides that at the very least, he will explore these chambers for any hidden clues of his predecessor before he is forced to meet the Swan again.

\-----

He’d discovered, in his searches, that the wardrobes were filled with a great assortment of fine clothes, jerkins and waistcoats and doublets in fine brocade, heavy and stiff, with gold and silver buttons, some of them glittering with gems, even one of which would have paid for the Jewel twice over. There were jabots made of fine lace, and even the shirts felt fine and smooth under his fingertips, as though they might snag and tear against the callouses he’d earned sailing his entire life. The breeches, too, were ornate and showy, the whole mess of it seemed made for some silly princeling more worried with his appearance than his kingdom.

He’d scoffed at it, and rather than making himself presentable for the lady, he’d given himself a quick glance in the looking glass beside one wardrobe, with his linen shirt missing it’s top two buttons; the worn, sun-bleached vest; the scuffed boots and loose fitting trousers, he’d deemed himself tolerable enough.

The Swan seems now to find him as distasteful as she had hours earlier, and yet, of every willing participant in the entire kingdom, Killian had somehow had the misfortune of being her choice. He means to bring it up, but before he can be bothered to remind her that his presence is entirely her doing, she has spun from him, weaving her way through a haphazard pile of books stacked high beside an ornate chair, past a table that is home to a scatter of parchment and scrolls held down by strangely shaped glass, or by yet more books. 

The disorder prickles at his skin, and he rubs his thumb over his knuckles, wondering, hoping, that he will not spend the next fifteen years of his life finding nothing but frustration in everything in this castle. 

She settles on a shelf a fair distance from him, frowning at the leather bound tomes she finds there. He watches as she raises a hand, long, delicate fingers sliding across the bindings, that same, infuriating head tilt twisting her neck to the side.

For the first time, he takes in her appearance fully.

Her neck is elongated by her posture, the pale of her hair stark against the dim light, her shoulders pulled back. The clothes she wears are strange to him - the heavy, stiff leather of her coat, close fitted trousers showing long legs, heeled boots that gleam strangely in the light from the flameless lanterns along the walls as she crosses one foot over the other, shifting slowly down the length of the shelf as she continues her search. She is solid and real here, in the low light, and he imagines this must be as close as he will get to seeing her for what she truly is. It’s startling, to think that she once must have been something like him, more human than...whatever she has become. 

With no crackle of fire, no breeze in the seemingly windowless room, he hears the quiet rasp of her fingers against the books, finding himself nearly mesmerized by the subtle movements of her hands, and he sees the glimmer of a ring on her finger - just the one, and so at odds with the rest of her appearance that he narrows his eyes to see it better, the gentle shine of a light gem, the thin, delicate silver of the band - before he can see more of it, she is curling her hand around one of the books, a thick, heavy tome that looks twice the age of any other book in the library.

She hefts it with ease, despite it’s size, and doesn’t spare him a glance as she takes it to the table, and Killian watches her as she sets it down, watches as she makes a gesture over the thing, as though turning a page, watches as the book flutters open and shifts three quarters of the way through, paper ruffling until the pages settle silently into place.

Finally, she looks up at him, pale eyes staring at him. “Well?” she says, impatience in her voice. “Are you going to stand there all evening staring at me like an idiot?”

Hackles rising, he stays exactly where he is. 

“Oh, for gods sake. Do you need a written invitation?”

He makes his way slowly to her side, hoping his careful, measured steps aggravate her at least half as much as her moue of annoyance exasperates him.

The book is old, full of yellowed paper that looks a strong breath away from crumbling to dust, but when he reaches out a hand curiously at the sight of so many different hands littering the pages, they feel as sturdy as new parchment.

Names. 

They are all names, signed in a deep, rusty brown color, and as he takes them all in, they seem to hover over the page, dancing across it, each one of them different not only in the shaping of the letters, but the feel of them too. They are foreign and strange, and yet, each and every one of them calls to him, wrapping him in their warm embrace, calling him home. He shakes off the feeling, horrified that for a moment he’d been happy to join them.

Below the last one, there is a blank space, and Killian stares at it, knowing without needing to be told what name should go there. 

Perhaps, if he refuses to sign his name - if he sits here in indolent silence for days, weeks if necessary, she will grow tired enough of him to let him go.

“It doesn’t work like that,” is all she says, her fingers rolling over her palm, producing a quill from thin air.

He takes it with a soft sigh, careful not to touch her in the process, and she stares at him expectantly. 

“There’s no ink.”

Rolling her tongue over her teeth, she gives him one crisp, firm nod, which only manages to infuriate him more. Her lips press into a thin line as she holds his gaze.

“How the bloody hell do you expect me to sign away the next fifteen years of my life without ink?”

Her shoulders roll back, her jaw clenching. “The book has no need for ink.”

“That’s all good and well, but the quill might call for it.”

“The others never had an issue.” Her voice has never once wavered, the same calm, collected tones, a bored nonchalance that sets Killian on edge - the only sign of her displeasure the line of her mouth and the flash of her eyes.

“Well perhaps you’d like to call one of them back to explain to me what it is you’re asking of me.”

The calm seems to snap. “Just sign the damn page, sailor.”

“My name is -.”

“The only thing in this room that gives a damn about your name this moment is the book.” There is a hard glint in her eye, her fist clenched against her thigh now, and Killian takes a small measure of satisfaction in realizing he’s riled her. 

He shoots a baleful glance her way and presses the quill, dry and inkless, against the page, readying himself to point out the severe lack of signature, but instead watches as his own name, in his wide, looping script, slides across it. As he dots the ‘i’s of Killian, he can feel prickles along the skin of his arm, gooseflesh rising while his forearm tingles up to the elbow, as though he’s held it in the same position too long and must now shake feeling back into it.

He finishes his surname in a rush, uncomfortably aware of the magic coursing across his skin, and the deep red of the ink. His eyes dart up to the dried names above his own, recognizing now the look of long dried blood. 

The quill vanishes from his hand, and when Killian turns to snap at the Swan, ready to release a stream of vitriol about his distaste of magic, the book snaps shut, just barely avoiding closing in around his fingers, and flies by itself across the room and back onto the shelf she’d pulled it from.

The Swan turns away from him without another word, retiring to the chair next to an empty fireplace, her long legs curling up, one over the other, her back still unnervingly straight and her arm thrown out to reach for the book on the very top of her teetering stack. 

“There’s a stew in the kitchens, if you find yourself in the mood for supper. You seemed to enjoy it, in the tavern this afternoon, although I’m sure if you ask it nicely you can have whatever you desire. We’ll start your lessons in the morning.”

There is so much to unload in that, he doesn’t know where to begin, but he settles on “Lessons?”

\------

He tosses and turns over the course of the night, unable to find a comfortable position in the too-soft bed, unable to calm his mind with the revelations of the day. He thinks of Liam finding his letter, and of the crew having a good laugh at the irony of his situation. He thinks of what danger Murtagh is about to send them into, and how he will not be there to help assess the situation - no matter his brothers calm in battle, Killian had always had the greater mind for strategy.

She’d been tight lipped on what, exactly, it was that he was meant to be taught, and he found it just as infuriating as the rest of her, mumbling under his breath as he followed the twisting staircases down towards the kitchens.

The stew sitting warm in the fire of the ovens had distracted him for only a short time, and he’d been wary of it, trying to figure out what on earth she’d meant by “asking it nicely”. He’d barely taken more than a few cautious bites of it before deciding he had no desire to eat, but there’d been no comfort in retiring to his rooms - the breeze drifting in from the windows was warm, but missing a certain bite he’d grown used to; the stone floors were too solid and steady; the room had grown dark while he’d been in the library, and since there were no sconces or lanterns along the walls, no candles to light a flame, he’d used the low moonlight drifting in through the windows to navigate his way. He’d lain in the four poster, not bothering to do more than remove his boots and vest, eyes staring unblinkingly above him, wishing for the ship, and the crew, and his brother.

He wakes well before the sun, and wanders the chambers in dim but growing light, hands drifting over the tapestries depicting wars, and champions, and gods knew what else. When weak bands of sunlight finally spread out over the chambers, he turns finally to the small room he’d seen the evening before.

The thick layers of dust are unchanged, and Killian finds himself irrationally displeased by the state of the room, and returns momentarily to the wardrobe, reaching with no small sense of defiance for one of the silk shirts hung there, balling it up without a care for the fine craftsmanship of it before returning to the dusty study. 

He spends an hour or so cleaning the place, ignoring the embossed titles of the fine leather books while he scours the place. He tosses the silk aside quickly enough - whatever small pleasure he’d gleaned from destroying one of the Swan’s fine things, silk was no use in truly cleaning a room. 

After the study is to his satisfaction, he moves on to the main chambers, pulling down tapestries he does not care for, dragging tables and chests to areas more suited to his taste, pulling open the rest of the heavy curtains to let the low, warm sunlight drift into the rooms, using the small basin of water he finds on the sideboard to scour the floors, as best he can.

The sun continues to slide across the morning sky, and Killian’s body aches pleasantly by the time he realizes that he’s nothing left to clean, except himself, and the Swan had most assuredly expected him hours ago.

Strange, that she hadn’t come to find him. He darts a glance to the door, still barred shut, and to the key he’d slipped from the lock the night before, still resting carefully where he’d lain it.

There is nothing left in this room that might help him avoid her, however, and so he returns his rags and the basin to the sideboard, wipes at a sweaty brow with the damp sleeve of his shirt, and unbolts the door to his chambers to meet the Swan.

\------

He’s halfway to the library before he realizes he isn’t actually certain that is where she’d intended them to meet, and he’s suddenly starving, too, having eaten nothing substantial since the morning before.

Killian changes course, wandering the halls slowly, careful to keep his boots on the rugs to avoid letting his steps echo, taking in the suits of armor and the paintings lining the wall.

Once, this castle might have been grand. It might have housed a king and queen, a host of lords and ladies, any number of servants and courtiers, ambassadors and councilors, all the sorts of people who went into running a kingdom, but the castle itself had long since fallen into disrepair - from the windows of his own chambers he’d seen a crumbling tower far across the courtyard, and the forest seemed to be growing into the castle itself, small saplings sprouting here and there within the yard and the gardens, out of place amidst the wild hedgerows which might have once been shaped by the best gardeners in the kingdom; there were vines twining and weaving their way into the battlements, and the mossy earth had moved in beyond the gates, almost as though it had been too long since man or beast had tread there. 

Still, the suits of armor gleam, and the portraits on the walls seem carefully preserved - in fact, the only two places he’d seen so far that did not seem spotless were his own chambers, and the library. 

However, it seemed unlikely that this had anything to do with whoever had come before him. His rooms alone had taken him hours to clean, and from what he’d seen so far of the actual castle, his chambers were only a small portion of it. More likely it was magic, unseen but still present, that preserved the quiet stillness and the cleanliness.

Alone to his thoughts, he enters the kitchens to find the Swan sitting atop a table that does not look strong enough to hold her weight, one leg crossed over the other, an unpleasant curl to her lip as she takes him in, eyeing his dust covered face and still-damp shirtsleeves, the wild mess of his hair, which he’d forgotten to tie back when he’d woken.

“I suppose it’s asking too much to expect timeliness or some semblance of order. You are, after all, not a naval man.”

The dig is meant to hurt him, and perhaps a few years ago it would have, but despite his disappointments in that regard, he’d had a good life so far, even without the commission he’d so yearned for.

After all of this was said and done, he’d leave with the same purse of coin all the ones before him had - be able to buy his own ship, if he so desired, and begin to create the fleet he and Liam had always dreamed of having. 

“There’s bread and meat waiting for you in the library,” she tells him, when he glances past her to the stove, as though he has tried her patience enough for one day. “If you’ll follow me.”

She holds out her hand expectantly, and Killian forces himself not to recoil from it. She’s changed outfits, this jacket with crisp, pointed shoulders, and sleeves made of some shining animal skin that looks somewhat like a fish scales - the shirt below made of delicate lace, the buttons climbing up her chest to the neck. Her hands are covered in thin leather gloves that end just below the wrist, the only glimpse of skin that of her face, still glittering ominously against the artificial light of her lamps.

“I’ll walk,” is all he tells her, not yet ready to deal with the great gasp of nothingness he’d felt the last time she’d used a spell to transport them both. 

“You’ll do no such thing.” When she stands, she unfurls herself like a bird taking flight, gliding across the room to stand before him, gloved hands grasping at his own, and he can feel the power coursing through her, even through the leather. “Close your eyes, and think of the library.”

There’s something gentle in her voice - not the same quiet indifference from before, but almost reverent, ebbing and flowing like a low tide on the shore. Her touch beneath his palms is cool, and without meaning to, he feels his irritation begin to slip away. He can hear the beat of his heart in his ears as they stand there, his eyes slipping closed as he imagines the room in disarray, the stack of books next to the chair, the musty smell of parchment, the delicate blown glass pieces working as paperweights, and beneath it his heartbeat fades away to the rush of the ocean, waves crashing in on each other, the noise of a slack sail catching a new wind, and when he blinks again, he is standing at the foot of the desk in the library, though he can still almost smell the salty sea air around him.

She hums, low in her throat, something almost like approval on her face, though for what, he does not know. He is only grateful that whatever spell she’d used to get them here, it hadn’t torn at his gut like the first time.

“An interesting choice. Water and air. Effective, though.” She says the words more to herself than to him, already scanning the shelf closest to him, fingertips tapping at titles while she bites at the inside of her lip. She continues this way for a few minutes, searching for something, and Killian feels the irritation that had left him for such a short, blissful moment return double. She hadn’t even chosen the subject of his lessons until just that moment, it seemed.

“Oh, calm down, Jones. I may be centuries old, but even I need a moment to learn your elements.”

“My what?”

She turns to him, the book she’d slid from the shelf a moment before grasped in her hands. “Are you daft or just hard of hearing?”

“You’re speaking in tongues, milady.” Her expression flashes darkly at the epithet, and he stores the reaction in the back of his mind for when he next feels the need to irritate her.

“Your elements. The foundation on which you build your workings. The tone of your - oh for gods sake, you idiot, your magic.”

Not a single thing she could have said would have been more unwelcome, but she looked as though she were providing him with some great gift. For Killian, however, he’d felt the world shift beneath his feet for the second time in half as many days. 

“You’re out of your mind.”

“Better out of it than completely without, Jones. Do try to pay attention.”

“No - you’re barking mad. I don’t have magic. You’ve made a mistake.”

Her eye roll is enough to make him want to throw the closest piece of glass against the far wall. “I’ve known you and your magic since you were a child, Killian Jones. And I don’t make mistakes.”

A feeling of dread washes over him, his mind whirring to keep up with the threads of this conversations, but there are too many strands, too many things to try to keep straight.

“Of course it’s been years since we last met. When you stopped returning to woods, I wondered if you’d been lost. I spent years attempting to find someone else, but then, a few years ago, there you were, in the same tavern where I’d last seen you.”

He remembered the night. The storm that had rolled in behind them lashed at the beach, and though Killian might have been content to spend the night soaked to his bones, Liam had insisted they find an inn for the night.

The only one left with a room to spare had been down at the far end of the lane, the bar already crowded, and something about it had prickled at Killian’s memory. 

It was the inn his mother had worked in, the inn where she’d collapsed the night before the Choosing, the inn where he’d held her hand and listened to her hum quietly, where he’d begged her to stay with him, tears rushing down his face.

He stares up at the Swan now, his face darkening, his eyes a little wild. She looks - pitying, at the very least, and he imagines if he looks hard enough he might find some small bit of sorrow, but it gives him no peace. 

His voice, when he can manage to speak without a waver, still cracks. “Did you take her from me?”

Shocked, her eyes widen. “No. What took her was…” She sighs. “It wasn’t my doing.”

“Then why didn’t you save her?” He can feel the anger rising within him, fierce and wild, ready to burst from him. 

“She was beyond my help.”

“But you didn’t bloody try, did you? You sat there, watching my grief, watching me as my mother faded before my very eyes, while they sang your praises down below!” The storm beneath his skin continues to brew, dark and heady, crackling in his bones. “And then you didn’t even have the courtesy to take me then! Fifteen years could have come and passed for me here already, and you didn’t even take me!”

Her mouth opens and closes as she struggles to find the right words, and Killian realizes with some small sense of wonderment that the air around them has begun to crackle with static, the crips, sharp taste of lightening settling around them. “You weren’t ready,” she finally settles on, not meeting his gaze now, but as he watches, she raises her hand to hip height, her fingers twisting as though reaching for the snarl of a rope, and the air grows thinner, stilling, the electricity draining from it like it’s being siphoned away.

Without the drum of his anger, he stumbles across the room to a chair far away from her, and they sit in silence. It could be hours, for all Killian pays attention the passage of time, as he tries to muddle his way through the slow trickle of his thoughts. Without the tempest to fuel his rage, he is left hollow and tired, angry without a means to make his thoughts into words, and so he presses the heels of his palms against his eyes and tries to will himself out of existence.

“I needed you to be ready.”

He looks up to see her watching him, something echoing like concern across her features, and though he is drained of words, of energy, of will, he stands. The muscles of his legs tremble under the effort, like she’d taken more from him than just the anger.

She had, he reminds himself. She’d taken everything.

“You and your lessons can hang.”

“Killian -.” The way she says his name is almost lyrical, soft and so different from everything else she’s said, achingly familiar, and he fights the memory of it, straining at the back of his mind, like a comforting hand curled warm into his own - he spread the fingers he’d curled into a fist wide, flinging away the though. 

“Come near me again, and I’ll spend the next fifteen years doing nothing but searching for a way to destroy you.”

She doesn’t fight it as he stalks away, shoving open the heavy door of the library, and it’s only once he’s reached his rooms that he realizes he’d never had the chance to eat.

But the bed, so univiting the night before, calls to him, and without another thought he slips into it, his eyes drooping closed, his hands curling into the downy pillows, and moments later he falls into dreamless sleep.

When he wakes, the room is dark save for a single, bobbing light next to the bed - one of the Swan’s creations - and there is a plate of food sitting on the stand below the light. He eats it greedily, fingers digging into the wing of meat, the vegetables melting in his mouth, and if he’d cared to notice, it would have been a wonderful meal, but the food tastes like ash in his mouth, and when he is done, he flings the plate across the room in a fit of pique and returns to his dreamless slumber.   



	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Still not speaking to the Swan, Killian begins to grow used to his magic.

Nearly a month passes without a word spoken between them. He sees her, on occasion, rounding corners or passing by doorways with him inside of them, but she makes no effort to speak to him, shows no inclination to be anywhere near him.

As his anger cools, he hates her all the more for following his wishes. He has spent the majority of his life surrounded by people, by the quiet murmurs of conversations just out of earshot, and the presence of bodies full of life near his own.

The emptiness of the castle is stifling.

With the revelations of his strange new (new to his own knowledge, at least) powers, he spends a few days in sullen silence, wondering if he can will it out of himself, if maybe the Swan could take it from him - she’d quite literally stolen the thunder from him that night in the library, so it had to be possible, hadn’t it?

But that would involve speaking to her, an act of surrender he is unwilling to show, and so he wanders the castle at length, discovering grand ballrooms, and lengthy hallways that lead down dead ends, alcoves and doorways hidden by tapestries, every nook and cranny of the place clear of dust and grime. The broken tower he’d seen across the length of the courtyard from his rooms took him two days of searching to find, and in the end, he’d been left without any further understanding of it - every time he’d neared the winding stairwell, he’d been distracted by something else: a particularly interesting storeroom housing nothing but farming tools; a painting of a young boy which seemed to draw him in for hours, until he shook himself free of the thrall of it; a room with nothing in it but an ancient looking bassinet, where a mobile still hung from the thing. Once, he’d made it one full circle up the winding staircase before remembering something that had felt incredibly vital at the time, but that he’d forgotten again the moment he was back in the main castle.

His curiosity piqued, he’d made a final attempt at mounting a siege on the damn tower, only to spend the entirety of his afternoon wandering a winding corridor that seemed to have no end, until he turned back and found himself at the bottom of the stairwell minutes later.

Eventually, he realized he could feel the power behind the spellwork, twisting into his mind, suggestive and conniving. There was nothing sinister about being driven to distraction every time he tried to enter the tower, but it concerned him, all the same, wondering what sort of casting could cause such a thing. 

In the end, that was his greatest mistake. Letting his curiosity lead the way.

He’d retired to the solar in his rooms, intent on finding any sort of clue as to what, exactly, was at work there.

Finding nothing useful, he’d gone, one last time, feeling out the edges of the spell, and he’d felt his magic pushing back. 

He should have recoiled. Should have closed his own mind to it, but instead, he’d reached out with the magic brewing under his skin, pressing and prodding at the spellwork, trying to find a way to breach it.

He never found a way, not a single hole, not a crack in the veneer, but his magic had rustled excitedly, focusing him this way or that, pushing him to let it build and well inside of him. 

It curled into him, not quite frantic but insistent, at least, and so he’d gone back to his chambers once more, resigning himself to the reality of it, this thing he hadn’t wanted, and didn’t trust, but which he knew might consume him if he let it run wild.

He plays at spellwork - first with small objects, flinging books across the wide rooms, shifting frames across the space of the walls. It’s nothing like the tendrils of the Swans magic that he’s felt before - this comes to him like the lurch of a ship when the wind catches in the canvas, like the flash of light as the sun sets on the horizon, like the steady roll of the ocean beneath the deck.

Hers had felt earthy, full of quiet murmurings and cracking twigs, the sound of a muggy breeze through leaves, a babbling brook - different, uncomfortable, foreign. Stubborn, almost, like a willow planted firm in the dirt, ancient and unmoving, where his was all movement and flight.

Despite his constant wariness of anything magical, his tiny spells brought him small comforts. If he twisted his hand just right, if he moved his arms a certain way, and channeled his thoughts just so, the magic sang in his blood, and welcomed him in.

Eventually, he reached a doldrum, and his mind began to grow static beneath his skin, impatient, and he turned instead to the books in his study. A fair few were useless to him - in languages he’d never seen, with words he couldn’t quite grasp; others still were merely filled with what he assumed were the personal chronicles of those who’d come before him, and though some mentioned spellwork, the cantrips felt stale and worn, unwelcome against his tongue; there were yet more books filled with history of the realm, or recipes, here and there a childrens nursery rhyme or an old fairytale.

The spellbooks he could decipher were mostly tricks, and when he practiced them the magic prickled under his skin, unsatiated by the simple incantations. 

Three weeks, the magic ebbed and flowed under his skin desperate to break free, as though the anger the Swan had stolen from him had escaped her grasp in fits and starts, slowly making its way back to him. He began to suspect that there was little chance of ever finding a way to be rid of it entirely.

On a restless night, a few days after he’d taught himself a spell for light (his shone like moonlight on water, flickering and cool, bright against the stone walls of his chamber) the magic crackled in his palms, nearly setting the curtains of the four poster aflame, and he’d clenched his fists against the onslaught, before it could overrun him.

_This_ was why he’d never trusted magic. It was uncontrollable - an entity entirely within it’s own power, with few strong enough to wield it safely.

When he strode into the library an hour later he half expected (half-hoped) to find the Swan curled up in her chair, but the room was dark and empty of company, with no one to unleash the persistent tension behind his ribcage upon.

He considers scanning the shelves, as he’s seen the Swan do, but with no idea what it is he is looking for, it seems a wasted effort, and so instead he lets the magic flow swiftly from his hands, building in waves and rushing out across the expanse of the room, filling it like a basin.

He follows the leylines of the magic, riding the waves where they take him, until he lands on a small tome, tucked high up on a shelf, the spellwork nearly singing to him. 

Killian pulls the magic back, letting it slide slowly back into his fingertips, terrified to pull it back in all at once and overwhelm himself, and as the last of it returns, he summons the book he’d found off it’s high shelf.

Without another breath, he tucks it under his arm and returns to his chambers.

\------

He barely eats, and sleeps not a wink, three days drifting by in the quiet comfort of his rooms, eyes devouring the spellwork on the pages. There is a heady feel to it, like a sip of rum after a few pints of ale, the burn of it smooth and intoxicating.

The magic that had been building in him finds it’s release as he draws water out of thin air to dance across the tables, and masters a trick for changing the breeze outside the windows. 

He hay have refused the Swan’s tutelage, but now that he’s felt the build and release of his magic, he wonders how he’d ever forgotten it was there.

It must have been, he realizes, for it feels familiar to him, like an old friend. Somehow, it had fallen away from his focus, and buried itself deep away, and now that he’s found it again he finds it difficult to let it lie still for a moment.

On the fifth night, with a salty breeze cooling his chambers and the sound of the tide lapping below his windows (a clever trick, he’d found the working inside the book, its winding, even writing explaining the power and the theory of the illusion), he sets the book down, and strips to his shift before retiring to bed, exhaustion sweeping over him the moment the cover of the spellbook is shut.

_He is aboard a ship, the sky above him swirling and dark, the deck bobbing viciously, rain lashing at his face, and all around him men run to and fro, sliding with the force of the ships movements. They are yelling, but the voices are muffled, just as the storm is - he cannot make out the words or the patter of the downpour, only the frantic panic setting in._

_This is a shipkiller, a maelstrom, and far above him the me struggle to tack up the sails._

_It’s useless - he knows this, and wants more than anything to tell them so, but they do no acknowledge his presence. He is a ghost, an observer, nothing more._

_Lightning flashes across the sky, bright and blinding, the thunder unheard over the force of the rain, but a few moments later he hears the crackle of timber. Glancing up, he sees men flinging themselves toward the deck, and raises his hands towards the sky as the mast comes crashing towards him, a silent scream on his lips._

He wakes with a cry, his hands held out from his face, a mighty gale catching the curtains of the four poster, a heavy rainfall tapping out a rhythm against the walls of his tower, echoing loud just outside his open windows. The ship and the men are gone, but in the pale light he can see flashes of lightning outside.

“Of all the _lunatic_ -.”

The Swan is there, staring at him over her shoulder as she holds her hands steady at the sill of the windows. 

She’s struggling to contain the storm, her hands shaking, her hair falling limp about her face as the rain streams in through the windows, a distant hum of words shifting across the stone walls.

“ _Help. Me_ ,” she grits out between phrases of spellwork, and he leaps from the bed, his bare feet padding across the floor.

The rugs at the windows edge are soaked through, his toes squelching through the puddles as he reaches her, and without a thought he joins his hand in one of hers, their fingers linking together. 

She stares at him, shock in her eyes for the barest of moments, before she turns her attention back to the storm raging outside. Her palm is soft and pliant against his own, and she grips his fingers more tightly, anchoring him to the here and now. Outside, a flash of lightning brightens the dark sky, and in the crash of thunder that follows he feels the calm of her magic seep into his bones.

The rain shudders, slowing for a moment as he lets the wandering creeks of her power shuffle against his skin, but then he startles at the sound of booming thunder overhead, ringing in his ears, and nearly drops her hand. She curses under her breath as the rain beats down fiercely again.

Killian focuses back in on the gentle patter of footfalls against mossy stones, tuning his gaze away from the storm to watch the Swan, the quiet brush of a soft breeze settling over him.

As she spreads the calm of her own magic, channelling it through their joined hands, she pulls at his own, digging hooks into the dark clouds, dragging static and shifting light out and away. The magic she pulls from him drifts lazily through the air, hovering inky black and viscous, momentarily mesmerizing him. 

Another crack of thunder, more distant now, rattles the shutters outside.

“ _Focus_ ,” she mutters, squeezing his hand again, and he does, imagining the way the clouds might lighten as a storm died, and the gentle dissipation of rain until it was nothing but mist against his face, the thunder rolling away behind them. 

When he opens his eyes again, the sky is cloudless and clear, starlight glittering across it, and the Swan is staring at him incredulously, her hand still held loosely in his own. 

She releases it in a rush, stepping away from him as though burned, and when the connection drops he feels exhaustion sweep over him.

Turning to the table in the middle of the room, she leans heavily against the back of a chair, unable to catch a breath, and Killian catches a glimpse of the black mist still hovering in the air between them. With a tired frown, she produces a small glass bottle, oddly shaped, and, with some effort, summons the remnants of the dream-spell inside of it, careful not to let it touch her skin. Once the last of it is inside, she stoppers it shut, shoving it into the depths of her robes.

The hour must be terribly late - for as he takes her in he realizes that for the first time, she is dressed not in the confinements of her dark leathers, but instead in a heavy dressing gown, pale, eggshell white in color, and her thick, silvery hair hangs about her shoulders, long and wild and shining wet against his moonlight lanterns, ones he’d apparently forgotten to snuff out before falling asleep.

Her appearance is so at odds with what he has grown used to, the rigid posture gone as she succumbs to the weariness he feels as well. The storm had sapped the energy from both of them.

He opens his mouth, not sure what it is he means to say, when her eyes land on the book on the table.

In a gust of wind from the storm, it must have been blown open, but it is a mercifully safe distance away from the window, and no water has touched the pages.

“Are you _absolutely_ -.” She closes her eyes, not finishing the thought. One hand rises to her face, thumb and forefinger pressing into her temples, and she starts again, a warning tone in her voice. “Do you mean to kill us both?”

He has no answer for her.

In a move that shocks him, the Swan pushes herself up and angles the chair, collapsing into it with an uncharacteristic lack of grace, and returns to steepling her head in her hand, eyes never leaving the pages.

Whatever the storm had been, it was of his own making, and he stares at the open book, still calling to him even now, with his magic drained.

Still in naught but his shift, he turns his gaze on her, waiting, watching, wondering what she means to do.

The jumping electricity of his magic is not building, now, and with a clearer mind than he’s had in weeks, he realizes that she still has a hold on it - beneath the steady crash of the tide, he can feel birds shifting through leaves, the rustle of branches in trees. 

“I thought I could control it,” he finally admits. 

She snorts. “Perhaps if you were anything like my normal pupils, you could have. If you were a mere hedgewitch, or had but a drop of Fae blood in your lineage, you _might_ have been able to.”

So they _had_ all been magic. Centuries gone by with no one the wiser about the thread that tied the Chosen to one another. How? How had she kept it a secret? And _why_?

“They why is a question for another day,” she speaks, and this time he feels the shift in the air as she presses into his thoughts - it reminds him of the spell on the tower. “As to the how, I’ve just told you. They had power, but it was weak, malleable. Perhaps one or two might have made names for themselves, but they never moved beyond a few clever tricks.”

Killian feels a growing sense of dread. “That was no charm,” he tells her, as though she doesn’t already know that far better than he.

“No.”

“What am I?” It comes out a whisper, tangling in doubt, in rising horror.

“You’re a man. A man with a _remarkable_ talent for absolute chaos, but a man all the same.” Finally, she turns her gaze up to him, a softness in her eyes that seems less out of place, with the tendrils of her hair curling against her forehead. There is some thought, itching for acknowledgement at the back of his mind, something about the look in her face that feels older than memory. But then, she’d already told him she’d known him for at least the majority of his life. “You also happen to be one of the strongest wizards I’ve ever encountered. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised this book somehow found its way to you.”

He hesitates to ask, and she levels him with an amused look. 

Right.

Mind reading.

“A young sorcerer wrote this when he was an apprentice. He was remarkable, even in a time where magic was much more common than it is now. You see, by the time he was taken on as a student, he’d already mastered all the elementals.”

“Who-.”

“-was he? He’s been known by many names, over the years, most of them in languages long dead. Much like the one _this_ is written in.” She gestures to the book, and with a queasy sense of wonderment, he sees the words on the binding shift into indecipherable symbols. “The book chooses the reader, not the other way around. There was a time when I could read it, as well. It’s a mischievous thing, just like its creator.”

She still hasn’t answered his question. In response to the unspoken thought, she sighs. “The people of Misthaven knew him as Merlin, before he disappeared.”

Killian blinks. There is not much he knows about the history of this land, but even far across the sea, the name Merlin held power.

She hums, as though in agreement. “You should get some sleep.” Eyes trailing over him, he watches as small splotches of color appear on her cheeks - her gaze darts away from his bare legs, focusing hard on the table in front of her for a moment before sliding up to his face. “If you are ready to begin your training, now, you may join me in the library after you have broken your fast. I’ll be there all day.”

It’s the most diplomatic she’s been since she appeared on his brothers ship, and with a heave, she pulls herself to standing again. She glances curiously about the room, and Killian wishes for a moment that he had any energy left at all to see if his magic would allow him to push back on the tendrils of her own, slip into her mind like she did his. 

“How did you maintain the lamps while you slept?” she asks.

Killiann shrugs helplessly. “They’re just moonlight. I supposed as long as the moon was in the sky, they’d stay lit without my helping them along.”

She hums again, her brow furrowing, and continues past him to the doorway. The door is still barred, the key for the lock still sitting in the keyhole. Killian watches her go, turning to follow the trail of her dressing gown as it slips soundlessly across the floor.

She is halfway out the door when she turns, her hand flicking towards the middle of the room, and the book leaps into her grasp. 

It’s just as well. Killian isn’t sure he could sleep with it still there.

Turning towards the bed, he loses sight of her, waiting for the telltale click of the door closing, but it doesn’t come.

“I tried.”

Her voice is barely above a whisper, but he hears the confession clearly. 

“Your mother. I tried to save her.” She stops, and Killian doesn’t dare turn to look at her. There is a vulnerability in her voice he never thought to hear, and it pulls at his chest, makes him uncomfortably aware of how intimate the last few minutes have been. “The magic was too strong. The darkness, it took her and…” Another pause, a shaky breath. “I tried to use your magic to help mine along, but the darkness was… it was too strong. I nearly killed you.”

He remembers the pain of listening to his mothers breath grow weaker, remembers feeling drained and empty - much like he does now, and like he had that afternoon in the library.

“You weren’t ready,” she repeats, the words so soft they might have been feathers floating to the ground.

“Rest well, Swan,” he says after a moment, blinking away tears in his eyes, and with a shuffle of fabric, she is gone.   



	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Killian and the Swan begin to settle into the castle together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few choice songs I listened to while writing this: “Horns” by Bryce Fox, “Hey, Brother” by Aviici and “Dauðalogn”by Sigor Ros, so, I guess, take from that what you will.
> 
> Thank you guys, sincerely, for all your kind words. It has been a delight reading your comments, and I can't wait to share the rest of this story with you.

Whatever small truce they’d called between them to contain the storm that night, it did nothing to stop her aggravating him at every turn, nor did it put an end to his impulse to try her patience whenever possible. There was a comfort in knowing one moment shared between them was not enough for him to grow too at ease with her.

Still, over the course of the next few weeks, they begin to grow a rapport.

They’d even begun to form a routine, of sorts.

Killian woke well before the sun, habits still unchanged despite his new and rather leisurely lifestyle, and spent a few minutes staring in annoyance at the silks and brocades and lace hanging in his wardrobe before putting on his own worn clothing.

Twice a week, instead of glaring dourly at the choice of clothing the Swan had left him with, he fashioned himself a basin and some soap from the air around him, and washed the aforementioned worn shirt and trousers, the simple, ordinary motions of the task soothing his mind. The Swan had given him a book of spells meant purely for cleansing, but he preferred the methodical action of doing them himself. The thought in his mind had exasperated her, but they’d moved on to something new the following day.

He spent an hour after that skulking the castle, surprised to find every day something he hadn’t discovered the previous day.

By the time the sun rose, he’d made it to the kitchens, where he broke his fast over the rickety table in the corner, head bent low over whatever book the Swan had presented him with the night before.

The kitchens held their own sort of magic - or perhaps his worked it, he was still a bit unsure - and every morning he lit the flames in the stove and the hearth, and every morning some delicacy appeared: honey glazed breads stuffed with raisins; delicate croissants, buttery and flaking against his tongue; porridge just the way his mother used to make it; sausage and fried eggs when he’d tired himself or forgotten to eat after his lessons the day before.

Very occasionally, he found dishes that were completely foreign to Misthaven, things he’d bought off street carts in distant lands, and he enjoyed those more thoroughly, losing himself in the memory of bustling bazaars and exotic spices, loud and intricate textiles and delicately crafted pottery.

The books she gave him became a bit of a game - solely for his own amusement, at first, to see the exasperation on her face every morning when he handed it to back her. At first she hadn’t believed him - couldn’t fathom how he’d grasped at the intent of the spellwork all in one night, and she’d begun to test him on it - sending hexes his way just to see if he understood the workings of defensive magic, asking him theories behind different elements, throwing up walls of spellwork just to see if he could solve their puzzle.

When she finally came to admit that he wasn’t merely being insolent, she, too, began to play at scheming, grabbing for ever more difficult tomes every evening, a challenging glint in her eye as she handed it off without a word.

She’d yet to find one he couldn’t devour by breakfast.

Killian can’t decide whether he’s begun to like her, or if he’s just been starved for company.

She’s stubborn - by the _gods_ , she’s more stubborn even than him - and whatever vulnerability she’d shared with him the night they’d conquered the storm together had only made her more reticent since.

Still, she was surprisingly funny, once her wit was not aimed solely at wounding him, and there was a comfort in her presence, a calming stillness that felt foreign and familiar all at once.

There were days where they sat in the library together, debating the merits of using air instead of fire, or speaking of the witches and wizards whose words filled the pages around them, or he maintained small, concentrated workings, where he longed to grip her hand once more, and feel the sturdiness of her power stand rigid against the clash of his own, feel it give, just a bit, to let the rage of his storm in.

And then a moment later she’d scowl and call him a fool as whatever spell he’d been holding fell to pieces in his distraction, sifting through his fingers like sand, and he’d forget all about it.

Today he finds her pacing the library in a foul mood, muttering to herself - at least, he believes it is to herself, although she darts a glance over her shoulder once, and pins a terrible look against a wall of books behind her.

Killian makes a point of knocking his knuckles against the door as he enters, and she snaps to attention, a wild look dissipating as she takes him in.

A scornful one overtakes it. _Wonderful_. He does so enjoy her ever vacsillating moods.

“I have provided you an _astonishing_ supply of clothing, Jones, have I not?”

“You have.”

“And yet, here you are, months later, still in your rags. Tell me, are you things not fine enough for you?”

Killian is in no mood to be treated like a child. _Or_ a subordinate.

“I don’t like them. They’re stuffy, they’re overly complicated, and I’ve no use for them.”

She huffs, sullenly, and Killian wonders when it was she’d decided to drop her unflappable persona. Was it that night in the storm, when he’d felt the presence of her magic sink into his own? Or had it been earlier, while she wandered the halls of her own castle like a ghost to avoid him? Perhaps after, when he’d sat across the table from her at the dinner they occasionally shared and told her a bawdy joke he’d expected her to be annoyed with, only to get to the punchline and find her covering her mouth with a handkerchief, her eyes glittering in amusement despite her attempts at hiding her laughter.

“What, exactly, would you prefer then?”

Killian stares at her for a beat, and then raises his arms, turning his gaze pointedly downward to himself. “ _This_.”

She sighs, impatient but surrendering, and pulls a book from the shelf behind her.

She tosses it across the room to him, ignoring his surprised yelp, and spins to a chair facing away from him, falling into it in a heave of irritation.

Killian tries, and fails, to keep his amusement hidden, but for all that he’d thought he would despise every moment of his time here, he can’t help but think no other pupil had ever managed to provoke her so. Then again, few had ever found the specific pleasure in it that he did. Few had likely ever dared. It helped that when she grew to annoyance, the veneer of her self-possessed facade fell away, and her eyes blazed, her voice changing pitch as color rose in her face.

Yes, he quite enjoyed watching her emotions play out. Perhaps, one day, he’d manage to pull out some sincerity.

The Swan snorted from her spot, hidden from his eyes, and Killian shot a glare at the back of the chair, thinking _get out of my head_.

He doubted the thought did much - it seemed more a reflex than anything else, as though she was so used to it she had never thought _not_ to have her mind half in his.

The spellbook in his hands is light, barely larger than a children’s story, but when he opens it the lines of script are thin and tight, winding along the pages like threads of an embroidery. It takes him a moment to grow used to it, but after a few furious blinks he realizes it is spellwork for altering fabric.

He reads through a few pages, sitting at the chair behind her desk, until he begins to grasp the method behind it, and turns his head in search of something to try it out on.

His gaze lands on the buttery leather of the Swans jacket, but the impish thought has barely crossed his mind before she waves a hand, his wardrobe emerging from the air behind her, blocking her entirely from his view.

He pulls the most obnoxious jerkin he can find from the thing, giving it a grimace before he sets it on the desk, and begins to catch the threads of the working.

The Swan goes still and silent behind the wardrobe, something in her still curious to know his methods, eager to understand his power, but Killian ignores it, lets the magic slip nimble and soft through his fingertips, lets the memory of his own shoddy work as a young boy with a needle and a sewing palm slip into the working, the memory of mending his shirts flowing into it as well.

When he opens his eyes again, the jerkinis gone.

In it’s place is a vest - far more ornate than anything Killian has ever owned, but still somehow simple enough for his taste, with black embroidery winding on a blood red silk brocade, black piping along the edges, finely shaped brass buttons lining either side of it.

Satisfied, he lays it aside and sets upon the rest of the wardrobe.

The spell comes easier to him, this time, and soon enough he’s turned the whole thing into clothing he’ll actually wear, and feels no remorse for the loss of the ridiculous frippery. Pleased with himself, he finally returns the vest to it and slides around both the wardrobe and the chair to stare defiantly at the Swan.

She gives him an unimpressed look. “Now put the wardrobe back where it belongs and summon the other one.”

\------

They dine together two or three times a week, though it’s the only time he ever sees her eat. She has an affinity for the rum he summons up, but she picks at the grand plates of food piled high, and watches him eat with a mixture of disgust and amused alarm. He’s never tasted so much good food in his life, and if not for the amount of walking he does, searching out the castles secrets every morning, he is certain he would lose his fit physique in days.

Tonight he dons his new clothing, giving himself a satisfied once over in the looking glass before he heads down to the hall where they usually meet.

It’s one of the smaller chambers in the sprawling castle, intimate enough that he is sometimes able to forget exactly how alone they are in it, and he enjoys the slide of the trousers against his legs, the new cut of his shirt, with it’s high collar lined with yet more buttons, and the way the cool evening air slides through it to his skin.

She’s already there when he turns into the chamber, staring at the roast swan with an unimpressed air, and he’s already gearing up for battle with her, ready to wave his hand over the thing and change it back to the chicken he’d had planned before she’d made him run all the way up to his chambers to ensure he’d sent the wardrobes both back to the exact spot they’d been taken from.

Instead, her breath catches in her throat when she glances up and catches sight of him.

Killian can see the effort it takes her to swallow as she stares him up and down, and he supposes he does look quite different.

He’d used a spell to slice off most of the length of his hair, a week before, annoyed to have it always in his eyes while he let his gaze sweep the pages of spellbooks, and though in theory the clothes he wore were nearly an exact replica of the one pair he’d come with, these are certainly finer, the slick leather of his trousers, the dark sheer material of his shirt, which he’d worn as usual, buttons undone until they met the opening of the vest he wore.

A word flits across his memory, one he hasn’t thought of in ages - _rapscallion_ \- and he raises an amused eyebrow.

Whatever had caused her sudden lapse of self control, it’s gone by the time he settles into the seat across from her, leaning heavily against the back of it, his legs spread wide.

She clears her throat, darts her glance to the table, and then reaches for a silver goblet decorated with fine, thin winding vinework, downing the contents of it and reaching for the bottle of rum to refill it at once.

Killian watches her in surprise as she piles her plate high with food, even pulling a leg off the bird on display in the middle of the table while she spoons vegetables out of their serving bowls.

He watches until she grows uncomfortably aware of his stare, and slows her movements before finally tilting her head up to meet his gaze. “ _What_?”

His shoulder jumps up in a shrug. “You don’t eat, much. Usually.”

“It’s not necessary,” is all she will tell him about the matter, and most of the time, he would let it lie, but tonight he is curious, and he can tell that the murmurings of his thoughts on the matter annoy her.

“And yet, tonight you’ve loaded more on your plate at once than I’ve seen you eat in all my time here.”

“I’m _hungry_ ,” she tells him, eyeing the line of his collarbone and the way the thin shirt lies against his chest.

It’s a thought that hasn’t entered his mind before now (at least, not _often_ , he will concede). The way she’s looking at him is curious, and new, and he feels his ears burning, but he can’t help the smirk that darts across his face, making her scowl at him and return to staring at her plate.

She’s far from unattractive, even with the strange paleness of her hair and the glittering of her skin, and he imagines that she must once have been a great beauty. The stories always made her so, a gorgeous, terrifying beast, who cared for her people by slaying their enemies.

But it is not that, exactly, that draws him to her, that makes him think of her in the dead of night when the magic is roiling under his skin and he can’t find a position that is comfortable for more than a few minutes. Trying to figure her out is maddening. There are days when their arguments about theories and methods for spellwork grow so heated they fling remnants of magic out into the room they are in, where the library grows warm enough for her to unbutton the cuffs of her shirt and roll the sleeves to her elbows, and her hair breaks from it’s bun in tendrils to curl loosely around her forehead (in the heat of the moment, he’ll watch the way her fingers brush them behind her ears with fascination, his own hands twitching with the desire to perform that action themselves).

No, it’s not that, that keeps him awake at night, wondering about her.

When he closes his eyes, he wonders what her life might have been like, before she saved Misthaven. Had she had a family? Friends, perhaps a lover? Had she known the comfort of other people, in her life, or had she always been so...alone?

He can feel the annoyed press of her magic against his skull, always moving and changing, like the spring runoff rushing to forge new paths in the ground as it makes its journey to the sea. Embarrassed by the train of his own thought, he pushes back against it, thinking of immovable boulders forcing the water to move around it, and just like that, the rush of her magic flows around him, instead of through.

She looks both impressed and disappointed.

“Stay out of my mind.”

She hums, and returns to her meal.

By the time they’ve finished, she’s eaten two full plates of food, and drank half his rum besides, and yet they are still both pent up and frustrated, the energy ringing between them. He has a vague inkling of a thought, one he hopes she hasn’t seen herself, and tries to remember what he’d done before he realized that he was charming enough to flirt his way into an easy fuck while ashore.

She shoots him a quick, frrustrated look. “It’d be far easier to stay out of your thoughts if you didn’t _fling_ them across the room.”

He scratches behind his ear bashfully, and takes another swig of the rum, and then it comes to him. “Have you ever handled a sword before?”

The Swan had been taking a drink of her own; she coughs, her face turning a becoming shade of pink as she attempts to compose herself.

\------

The yard is bathed in deep shades of red and purple as twilight sets in, shadows cast by their figures as they circle each other. Killian hadn’t thought for a moment that she’d take him up on the suggestion of sparring, but there’d been a sparkle in her eyes when he’d said the words, her gaze turning far off and distant for a moment before she turned a frankly wicked grin on him. “You couldn’t handle it.”

Surprised by the playfulness in her voice, he’d responded as though to a woman he’d met in the tavern, and not the powerful sorceress he’d disliked so fiercely only weeks before. “Perhaps _you’re_ the one who couldn’t handle it.”

While he’d been choosing himself a weapon from her collection in the armory, she’d stripped herself of her jacket, and in the low light in the yard, he watched her now as she paced back and forth.

She has good form - he can see that already, in the few parries they’ve shared as they test each other out - there is something almost familiar in the way she carries herself, the way she holds the hilt, the way she settles her weight from foot to foot.

He lets out a delighted bark of laughter when she rushes towards him, raising his own cutlass against the attack of her broadsword, and the clash of metal rings through the yard as he pushes back, using his weight to shove her away.

He presses his advantage, his shoulder rolling as the sword makes a high arc, but she defends the blow, her leg kicking out to push him back, catching him in the gut and nearly doubling him over.

He grins again. She’s no novice, at this - she has a style, knows how to use her body - knows when to fight dirty. There’s no urgency in their movements, yet, though he can sense already that it will get there - for now they are toying with each other, feeling each other out. She parries his attacks, he uses the strength of his limbs to press her backward, she spins and settles low, carrying her weight where she can use it to her best advantage.

They go on like that for a while, until the sun has sunk below the horizon and the only light above them comes from the reflection of it in the clouds above. His blood is humming in his skin, and he can already feel the delicious ache of a good fight settling into his muscles. What has delighted him most, though, is the constant stream of insults they’ve been sending back and forth at each other, nothing of true ill intent, merely a battle of wits to match the clanging of their swords, the rhythm of it almost musical as the fight goes on. It reminds him, unnervingly, of the stretch of her magic against his own.

She doesn’t tire, but he can see her losing focus, settling too easily into their steady rhythm, and there he finds his upper hand.

She goes for the kick, again, ready to let the momentum fuel her spin, but he catches her leg, instead - her eyes widen in the moment before he yanks, and she goes tumbling to the dirt with a cry of bewilderment.

The sword in his hand swings towards her as she falls against the gravel, and hers rises to meet it, but he’s won, and they both know it.

His smirk is wide and triumphant as he presses his weight into the blade, watching her arms quiver to hold him away from her.

She sighs, her breath coming in deep huffs as she struggles. “Going to stab me now, Jones?” It’s a joke, mostly, but neither of them are ignoring the fact that not very long ago, were they in this position, he would have tried.

“I assure you,” he says, voice low as he leans over her. “When I jab you with my sword, you’ll feel it.”

In the darkness descending on them, it is difficult to see her expression, but he feels the discomfort of her magic as it rushes out, sending him flying backward and away from him in a wave.

They don’t speak as they return to the armory, returning the weapons to their places, and she pulls her jacket back on, turning towards him at the doorway, her face bathed in the low light of one of her lanterns, shadows flickering across her skin.

She seems to want to say something, but is unsure what, exactly. Killian again struggles to keep the wish to see inside her own mind to himself as something indecipherable crosses her expression, and finally, she turns to leave.

“I still won!” he calls out behind her, unsure why he wants her to stay, if but for a moment more.

She glances over her shoulder, eyes rolling, mask firmly back in place, whatever she’d been feeling hidden well now. “Whatever you say, Jones.”

His lips turn up, a genuine smile lighting his features, and as she turns away he catches a wisp of her own grin.

\------

The fight had done nothing to ease the tension thrumming through him - it had, in fact, made it worse, like a line pulled taught with no slack to ease it. But the spar had, at least, exhausted him, and he curls into the four poster, his eyes drifting closed as he summons up a quieter, softer version of the ocean spell outside his window, and the hushed sound of water lapping against the stone outside eases him to sleep.

_The blast of cannon beats against his eardrums as he rushes up the shoreline, eyes intent on the shoddy barricade set further up the sand. There are swords clashing, and pistols firing, and all around him the sound of grunts and cries, men falling to the sand, unmoving._

_He ignores it, eyes searching frantically, his heart pounding viciously against his ribcage._

_Cannons blast again, and chain shot goes sailing past him, careening through the barricade, the force of it driving back two men with a wild scream._

_The heat of the sun beats down on them all, and over the clatter of bullets and the screams of the men, he can hear the ocean tide whispering behind him, calling out to him, attempting to ease his mind._

_He longs to turn towards it, but he is still searching, still desperate, and he moves along, further up the beach, past a man grasping at the bloodied stump of his leg, past the barricade, inland until he has to leap boulders to make it to the treeline, where the majority of the fighting is being done._

_Amidst the trees, the sound of the ocean fades, and Killian ignores the clash of swords around him, eyes casting about._

_The desperation seeps into his marrow, his chest tight with worry, as he watches a man slit another’s throat, only to keel over a moment later with a blade through his belly._

_He crumbles to the ground, but the man who’d done the job iis already turning away, raising his sword against another attack - he sins and parries, his jacket whipping around him, and fells this attacker, too, yelling out a command Killian can’t hear over the din of battle._

_His fine jacket is stained with blood, his boots caked in mud, his curling hair covered in a fine dusting of sand and soot, but he looks glorious, standing tall and firm against the onslaught. Killian moves towards him, reaching out a hand -_

_From his left, a man rushes towards the great warrior, but he doesn’t see the attack coming, his back towards it as he surveys the scene, and Killian feels panic rising within him as the man grows closer, raising his sword -_

“Liam!”

Killian blinks away the dream, the moonlight lanterns flickering to life at the bedside as he scrambles to rid himself of the coverlet, already reaching for his boots at the bedside before he realizes where he is.

_Just a dream_ , he whispers over the pounding of his heartbeat. _It’s just a dream_. Outside, the sounds of the ocean stir something inside of him, and he takes a few deep, steadying breaths, eyes closed as he leans against the serpentine carvings of vines on the headboard

He startles as the door to his rooms bangs open, reaching for a weapon, anything that might help him, and finds only the book the Swan had given him the night before, the first he’d failed to complete in a single night, and he wonders vaguely if he’ll be able to grasp it’s complexities before their meeting that morning, if only to continue their battle.

He throws it without another thought, the frenzy of the combat in his dream still driving him.

The Swan catches it with ease, his dread eased somewha ~~t a~~ t the sight of her, but only for a moment.

She’s still in her jacket and trousers, although the vest she wears beneath it is  open, a strange sight to him, as buttoned up and crisp as her appearance usually is. There is a concerned pinch to her features, and her hands shake as she sets the book on the sideboard.

“Get up,” she tells him, her gaze sweeping over his rooms, avoiding his eye. “Something’s happened.” 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A visitor brings news of the goings on in Misthaven.

Her footsteps echo down the corridor as she leads him out of his rooms, winding their way through parts of the castle he’s explored before, past a grand ballroom and the library and the kitchens, until the scenery becomes less familiar, the uneven winding staircases leading him towards a destination he’s not quite sure of. It’s the middle of the bloody night, their only light the bobbing orbs along the hallways, glowing into life as they move along, snuffing out behind them the further they go. 

She’s still in the clothes she’d worn to dinner, the jacket tight across her shoulders, her boots clattering against the stone floors, and he wonders, not for the first time, if the woman ever sleeps.

He’s surprised not to receive an immediate response to his silent query - whatever has happened, it has left her distracted enough not to pry into his thoughts, or at least too tired to answer his benign questions. There is a sense of relief in knowing that she isn’t constantly in his mind, and yet, he almost feels disappointed to get no response from her.

She is silent, and it gives him far too much room to mull over things, like the pinch of her face while she’d watched him tug his boots on, like the thrumming magic, not his own, filling the rooms and corridors like wildfire, consuming the air as they walked. Like the dream.

Already pieces of it were falling away, but he remembered just fine the call of the ocean behind him, and the desperate pull to find his brother. The taste of gunpowder is strong against his tongue, still, and the tang of blood sticks in his nostrils, but worst is the terror of not knowing whether the attacker had gotten to Liam. 

_Just a dream_ , he tells himself, but he’s believing it less and less.

When he’d been a boy of thirteen, he’d been driven to a rage during one of Silver’s “rescue” missions. To the land of Misthaven, they were merchants collecting wares for the kingdom, but Killian knew better. Though they never failed to return with whatever it was they’d been sent for, it was the raids that made Silver and his crew so unappealing to Killian. 

The first time Liam joined a raid, Killian hadn’t spoken to him for a month. By the fifth one, Killian had all but given up hope that this life held anything good in it for either of the Jones boys. 

During the sixth, Killian killed a man for the first time.

He can still remember the man's face - older, grizzled, worn by too many years at sea. He can recall with perfect clarity the shock and surprise on his face as the blade had dug deep into his belly, the way he'd stared first straight ahead, trying to find his attacker, the way his gaze had finally dropped to see Killian standing there. Both of their hands had been red with warm blood, and around them it was as though the world was speeding by - the blast of guns ringing dully in Killian’s ears, the clash of swords barely hear over the sound of his own blood rushing in his veins, the sounds of men crying, wooping, dying all around him. 

That night, Silver had declared him a true scoundrel, and clapped him hard on the back while he described the look that had overcome Killian’s face when he’d seen his brother under attack. Silver had offered him his own flask, and Killian had taken a deep, long pull from it in desperation, hating everything about all of it. Liam had stared at him with worry in his gaze, Killian coughing and spluttering at the sharp tang of it, while the crew laughed around him. But despite nearly coughing it all back up, a moment later he was tipping the flask up again, savoring the burn of it, enjoying the way it numbed him to the disdain he normally felt for the crew.

It had made him numb enough to forget the mans face for a moment, cloudy enough to forget that the following morning he'd be back to swabbing the deck with Silver barking orders at him, and for a while, a good, _long_ while, he'd been content to let his life be what it was, as long as there was rum at the end of the day. 

And then it had been midday, and then upon waking, and Killian had grown used to the raids, used to the men, used to ignoring the horrible sinking feeling in his gut every time the crew spotted a vessel riding low, ripe for the taking.

Killian thinks back on it now and wonders if he'd ever truly thanked his brother for pulling him out of that haze, for demanding more, and better. For saving him from what would have been a sad and short life, playing at pirates. For freeing him.

He can't help but wonder if he'll ever get the chance, now.

The Swan makes a sharp turn, leading him down a winding staircase, the uneven steps jarring him out of his stupor as they carry on at the same too-fast pace, and when they reach the bottom he finds himself running nearly headlong into the Swan’s back, not noticing until too late that she’s come to a stop. 

A wall of magic stops him short, and it feels like falling into water, only quite a bit less violent. Though he slows significantly, he doesn’t quite come to a stop right away, almost sinking into the barrier before his feet pause in their movements. 

The Swan doesn’t even bother to look at him, and he feels a sense of irritation that she’d seemed to know he wouldn’t stop in time, and rather than throw out an arm or give him a warning she’d just -

He glances at his feet, and there, just beyond where they are standing, he sees why she’d done it.

There is a gaping hole below them, the stone floors blasted away, and on the far side of the great hall there is more of the same, as though some massive cannon had blow it away. It had once been a staircase, he imagined, glancing out across the dimly lit space and into what he now realized was the main hall, grand, tall doors springing from the ground before him, an empty hearth to his left and fire-darkened stone to his right. 

“What-?”

“It’s a long story we’ve no time for, at the moment,” she tells him, her tone clipped, tense.

He startles as, across the great hall, the heavy wooden doors shake and shiver, the sound of something large and metallic knocking against them.

“We have a guest,” she says, something wry and annoyed in her voice, and when the next knock comes, loud and echoing in the hall, she tilts her head, gesturing for him to follow.

Off to the side is a small alcove hidden away behind a tapestry, and they both duck behind it into a narrow alcove hiding an even narrower staircase. They follow it down, finally reaching a door that, when pulled open, reveals another woven hanging, and they slip past it into the entryway just as another knock shakes the door.

Closer to the source of the noise, now, he can feel the power behind it. This is no battering ram.

It’s more magic.

“Yes, very clever of you,” the Swan snaps, when he voices the thought, but Killian is too curious about the strange new feeling the magic conjures up in him to feel his normal ire at her sharp words.

A chandelier dangling, half broken above them, tinkles and chimes as another knock hammers the doors, and Killian stretches out his magic, closing his eyes, and lets it drift slowly, curiously towards the doors, and whatever lies outside of them.

The power on the other side of the door is coiled tight, sophisticated and carefully controlled in a way Killian’s is not, but it is also a bit wild, crackling and spitting like a flame on too long a wick, jumping too high only to be reined in once more. It licks at the far side of the door, more likely to burn the doors in on themselves than knock them open.

Another knock never comes. 

The Swan waves her hand, and they swing wide, sliding across the stone floors, dragging debris with them to fall against the walls.

A shadow looms in the moonlight for a moment, and then he hears the echo of footsteps as it moves into the doorway, pausing after a few steps near the yawning chasm of the hall.

A whispered word, and suddenly torches come to life along the walls, illuminating the space, and their guest.

She sneers at them both, taking them in. The Swan is almost gleaming in the firelight, the dancing flames of the torches casting shimmering shadows over her face, and he has a sudden, startlingly clear memory of seeing her in that cove, the night before the Choosing, how she’d shifted in and out of reality like a ghost, the form she’d taken mercurial and changing, scales to wings to moonlight shadow, the swirling, mawing darkness in her gaze. She pulls her shoulders back, darting a glance at him, and he knows she’s catching his thoughts again, but the movement is so birdlike he blinks quickly just to make sure she’s still there, standing solid beside him. 

Killian looks ridiculous beside her in all her dark splendor, in one of the plain white roughspun shirts he’d conjured up the day before, a pair of course trousers tucked into scuffed boots, his hair a floppy mess, mussed from his tossing and turning against the onslaught of the dream earlier. 

The woman before them quirks an eyebrow, staring curiously at him. She’s dressed - rather provocatively, for such a late night surprise visit, her hair pulled into an elaborate updo, the low cut of her neckline glistening with bright gems, her riding jacket cinched tight around her waist, the shining leather of her pants gleaming against the torchlight. Her lips are stained a deep red, and as she continues to watch him, he feels the ghost of flames licking over his skin.

She flicks her eyes to the Swan, and the flame abates.

“Is it too much to ask that you take the blood magic off the doors before I arrive?”

“Yes,” the Swan snaps, and the other womans eyes narrow. 

“There’s no need to be snippy.”

“If you’re here for what I suspect you’re here for, then I imagine snippy will be a welcome relief.”

This new sorceress rolls her eyes, obviously used to the Swans fickle mood swings. “Well, right to it then, I suppose. The library?”

The Swan stiffens. 

“Oh, fine, the laboratory, then. Wouldn’t want to disturb your precious books.”

\------

The room comes as a surprise to him. They walk, all three of them in a straight line, around the crater in the middle of the great hall, past the dark and empty hearth, through a doorway that leads downward, their steps echoing faintly along the walls, the Swan’s light bobbing ahead of them, and torches floating along above their heads, Killian taking the rear as the air grows damp and musty.

The walls here are covered in moss, the smell of it thick and earthy, the sight of it reminding him of the vines winding into the battlements, the forest creeping into the stone walls surrounding them.

At the bottom of the stairs they take a sharp left down another dark hallway, and at the end push through a door that creaks on its hinges in disuse.

Firelight flickers to life along the walls, and it looks odd and foreign to him. He is grateful when the Swan’s bulbs of light appear above them, and takes the room in with a curious eye.

It’s only the third room in the castle he’s ever seen in disarray, and though the first two had been mild in their messes, human made, this is something else entirely, like the room had been left this way, to wither and decay in darkness, out of spite.

The walls are lined with shelves, heavy and laden down with more books, and the same strange, oddly shaped glass bottles, but these are filled with strange liquids, some bubbling, some shifting from liquid to mist and back again, varying in color. They’re all covered in a thick layer of dust, and cobwebs obscure a clear view of them. Littered across the space are various tables laden with strange looking equipment, long disused, and at the far end stands a wide slab of granite next to a fireplace.

A fire licks merrily at the stone surrounding it, no doubt this new sorceress’ doing, and in the light of the flames he can see a cauldron, strangely made, not of iron, but of something that gleams like gold. Of course, it’s a ridiculous notion - gold melts far too easily.

There are a myriad of dried plants hanging off the ceiling to one side, and as they walk farther into the room Killian can see that the shelves further back are lined with slightly more ominous trinkets - bleached white skulls, a glass filled with animal claws, things pickled in jars he’s not entirely certain he wants a closer look at, and odd baubles, too - a strangely shaped blade; a single, foggy white bean; a feather gleaming silver in the firelight, a single gauntlet and the matching helmet, a ring with a ruby red gem in it.

The place feels grimly like a mausoleum.

They all settle around the stone table, and, close to it now, he can see the delicate carvings around the base of it, in the same, quicksilver symbols of Merlin’s grimmoire. “I see your disdain for potion making hasn’t changed.”

The Swan sighs. “Regina, would you please just...not?”

“Yes, all right.” She sweeps a hand across the table, and a wide parchment appears, covering the wide expanse of the stone. As he watches, ink swirls across the page, wide mountain ranges leaping to life, rivers cutting over the landscape, racing towards a shoreline that makes him ache in it’s familiar edges, cities and towns and tiny villages popping up, until a full and intricately detailed map of the kingdom is there before them. 

“There’s been an attack on our eastern border,” the woman, Regina, says, one finger flicking over the page, and shining red light flashes across an inch or so of land along said border. “Aldebrand sent a company of men over the mountain pass, and they burned a village to the ground. Meanwhile, on the southern front, we’ve heard rumors Camelot is gathering an army.”

“Why?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. The King assures me there’s been no slight against either one of them, and he’s too much of a fool to lie to me.”

“Do you think it’s -?”

The Swan cuts herself off, darting a quick look at Killian, but Killian is staring at the map, and only catches the turn of her head in his periphery. Different colored shafts of light are flashing here and there along the page, but as he watches it, small parcels of the land are swallowed by a rolling fog, almost as though the map is tracking a storm.

“Of course I do. Why else would I have come to you first?”

“How could I possibly know how long you’ve had this information? For all I know, you’ve been hanging on to it for months, waiting for the perfect opportunity to prove your worth to the King by saving the day.”

“Oh that’s rich, coming from _you_ , how dare you imply -.”

“Enough!”

The dull thud of Killian’s fist against the granite, muffled only slightly by the parchment, forces them both to jump. Or perhaps it is the echoing ring of his voice, amplified and booming, or the sparking current of light that bounces off the slab of stone and into the hearth, causing the fire to jump and burn hot for a moment.

Regina recovers first, tilting her head to stare at him more carefully now. “Well, you aren’t her typical brand of useless, are you?”

All her focus seems to have gone away from the map, now, and she circles around the table to get a closer look at him. Almost at once, she cuts her glance to the Swan, her gaze sharp. “You failed to mention the reason for these attacks might be standing two feet from me.”

Killian opens his mouth to protest, but the Swan cuts across him. “Don’t be ridiculous, _you_ didn’t even know about him, how could Camelot or Aldebrand?”

Regina slides her gaze over to him. “There was a storm, nearly a moon ago now. It rolled over the capital on a cloudless night, and nearly destroyed two villages in Misthaven. And just as it began to rage it’s fiercest, suddenly it was just...gone. Rolling away and leaving only a fog in its wake. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

Killian is fairly certain he doesn’t need to answer her. 

“Your crumbling little castle is close enough to both their borders - if we saw it in the capital, it’s safe to say they noticed it as well.”

The Swan seems to have reached the same conclusion, but rather than respond with more biting words, she seems almost to deflate. 

“It’s not just that, Regina.” She waves a hand over the parchment, and the grey, looming fog hanging over it melts into the page. Long, spiraling black lines shoot across it, through forests, across lakes and rivers, meandering over valleys and blackening whole villages. “It’s growing stronger. I can feel it -.” Her voice, usually so steady, shakes. 

“There’s nightshade growing in the wood again,” Regina tells her, and the Swan nods. 

Though much of the conversation so far has meant little to him, this sends a spark of dread down his spine. 

“What, exactly, are you saying?” he questions, turning to stare at Regina, in all her fiery luster. The sharp edges of her magic crackle against his skin. “Is Misthaven at war?” He thinks again of the dream, of chasing after Liam, of the blade reaching for him - but Regina had said nothing about an attack from the sea, and the ocean had swayed behind him in the vision.

“It’s very likely to be, soon enough. But we have a much larger concern.”

“ _What_ ,” he snaps back, and her brow ticks up, surprised at the outburst.

“Regina,” the Swan says, warningly, and the other woman waves an impatient hand her way.

“The Darkness is regaining strength,” she tells him, a weary tone to her voice. “And our dear Emma may not be enough to stop it, this time.”

\------

It’s only much later, when Regina has retired to one of the guest rooms, and Killian has followed the Swan mutely to the library, leaving behind the dark and musty lab, that he remembers what Regina had called her.

Emma.

It’s such a simple, quiet name, pure and unassuming, and it shouldn’t fit her. 

Somehow, he can’t stop thinking of it once he’s started, a refrain in his head, rolling it through his mind like a cantrip. 

It feels warm, earthen, sprouting like a sapling against his tongue, but he doesn’t say it aloud. 

They settle into chair before the fire in the library, her face weary and conflicted. Eventually, she begins to speak.

“I was like you, once.”

He shifts his gaze to watch the way the flames dance in her eyes, but her face stays stoically turned towards the fire.

“It was...centuries ago. It was a different world. But I came into my magic unhappily, and for many years I fought with every fiber of my being to be free of it.”

“What changed?”

Her smile is slight, just a small upturn of the lip, a gentle dip of her cheek where the skin dimples. “Love.”

She doesn’t expand on that, but he can see it in her gaze, the loss she’d seen, both before and after this nebulous time she spoke of. It was remarkable, when she was like this, how much she reminded him of the books he could grasp in a single night.

The walls climb back over her gaze a moment later, and she continues as though telling an old fairytale, far away, impersonable.

“The Darkness was a manageable thing, for centuries before I was born, but it grew in power, and by the time I was strong enough to help beat it back, it had become too strong to contain. There was only one way to save the people - my people.”

She tilts her head to the side, gaze far off and away, and under the paper thin smoothness of the skin of her neck he can see a flicker of black fog. He knows what to expect before the words are out.

“I couldn’t allow it to take the people I cared about. I let it consume me, knowing I’d be destroyed, hoping I’d be able to take it with me.” Her huff of breath is soft, an ironic tilt to her lips. “Instead, it made me strong - invincible, really, and time stood still for me. I didn’t age. I didn’t change. I just became...this.”

“What is the purpose of the Choosing? Why do you take someone with magic?” He’s certain now that he knows the answer, hoping in vain she might refute it.

“I had hoped that someday, I might find someone to eradicate it.”

“Eradicate _you_.”

Though he’s loathe to admit it, the idea of it being him to destroy her doesn’t settle well. He can feel his magic thrumming against his skin, pushing and pressing and prodding, just as unhappy as he with the thought that she might believe him to be up to such a task.

“Yes,” she admits, quietly, thumb toying idly with the ring on her finger, sliding the band until the gem rests in her palm. She clenches her fist. “What did you dream of, the night of the storm?”

It’s an abrupt change of pace, but one he is surprisingly welcome for, the confession hanging over them both now. He tells her, stilted and unsure, of the tempest, and the ship, the crackling storm above them, the rupture of the mast, the chaos. When he has finished, he can feel the snap of thunder in his veins, and for a moment wonders if she will siphon it off of him again - wishes for it almost, but instead, in cool, calming tones, she laces a cantrip into the air, settling like a flask in front of him, and he presses the storm into it, steady and flowing, until he is out of the eye of it.

It’s a strange feeling, watching the magic leave him - stranger knowing that she’d purposely found a way not to hook her own magic into his. 

“And the other? Tonight, when I woke you, you called out your brother’s name.”

“It was just a dream,” he tells her, but the broken refrain feels unsure, spoken aloud. She sighs, and he tells her of this one, too.

By the time he’s finished, his hands are shaking, and she conjures up a bottle of rum without another thought, letting a glass tumbler of it float across the space between them. 

He guzzles it down. “It’s not - they’re not… those things haven’t happened.”

She meets his gaze for the first time that night. “No,” she says, with so much certainty he truly believes her. But she opens her mouth to speak again. “These are visions of things that may come to pass.”

“I’m seeing into the future?”

She scoffs. “Time is not nearly so linear as that. A thousand things could happen between now and then to change what you saw. A heron might flap its wings in Agrabah and force the storm to change direction. A tree may fall into a stream, and change the course of it, flooding a clearing, allowing a fawn a reprieve from the predators on the riverbank, and in turn a wolf might find a shepherds flock to slake it’s hunger. There is nothing certain about a future laid out before you.”

“Then why have I seen it?”

She contemplates the question for a moment. “I don’t have an answer for that. Your powers are...elusive, to me. There’s no question they are strong, but I haven’t...I’ve never seen them before.” She gestures to the books around them. “Nothing in these books has, either.”

“There are _thousands_ of them, surely…?”

“It’s the _myriad_ of different things you are able to do which mystifies me.”

They sit in silence while Killian mulls that over. He aches to see his brother, to hear his voice, to let the sound of it soothe him of this gnawing worry. He had never wanted to be powerful, only free, and this? This feels like shackles.

“If there is to be a war… is it possible what I saw was part of that?”

“Do you think it likely your brother would abandon his merchant ways to defend his homeland?”

_Yes_. More than likely. Killian had only ever wanted to sail the seas with his brother at his side. Liam had coveted a fine blue coat and a naval commission. He loved Misthaven.

The thought does nothing to ease his mind. 

“You needn’t keep me company,” she said after a beat, and he blinked, realizing how late (early?) it was, and how little sleep he’d gotten the night before. He nearly stood, then, to return to his rooms, to force away the lingering dream and let the sound of waves lapping at his windowsill drag him under once more.

Instead, he curled more deeply into his chair, reaching with the dregs of his magic for a book he’d seen the day before. 

As he lay the book out in his lap and began to read, he felt the Swan’s eyes on him, studying the side of his face. Though he could not explain why, it felt safer in here, with the Swan next to him, her flickering lights overhead and the calming thrum of her magic babbling across the fire. 

Her gaze falls away, after a moment, and he lets his eyes turn to the cramped text of the book, her name repeating in the back of his mind, more firmly settled, more _right_.  


_Emma._


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Swan and Regina seem unconcerned about the possibility of war coming once more to Misthaven. Killian experiments with magic to slightly less disastrous effects than the last time he was left unsupervised

It doesn’t take him long to discover there is tension between the two sorceresses he finds himself stuck with in this derelict castle. He rarely sees them in a room together where whatever conversation they’re having doesn’t devolve to an argument, and even away from each other, they seem eager to point out the faults of the other. The Swan is more civil about it, preferring to sway the conversation elsewhere the moment Regina is brought up, but Regina herself seems to hold no such qualms, and Killian finds himself, more often than not, defending the Swan, regardless of whether or not she should be defended. 

It’s strange - Regina has quite clearly known her far longer than Killian, and yet, even the qualities which drive Killian to annoyance on a daily basis, when being dissected by this interloper in the castle, are met with a stubborn wall of resistance. 

Regina finds it amusing, and seems to find no issue in teasing the both of them about Killian’s ready defense of all the Swan’s least likeable qualities.

More odd, though, than Killian’s inability to keep himself from fighting against any and all (completely valid) complaints about the Swan, is the fact that neither of the women seems to find any sort of urgency in the notion that the country is soon to be at war. In the two weeks Regina has been here, they’ve barely spoken a word of the impending likelihood of an attack. At least, not in his presence.

The Swan, however, has doubled her efforts to train him in whatever magic she can drudge up from her library, the Regina has taken to giving him unnecessary and certainly not sought after pointers, whether he struggles with the magic or not. He soon comes to realize that where the Swan is more concerned with the outcome, Regina is more critical of the process. 

“There are theories to every spell known to us, methods of honing it, making it work to your advantage,” she tells him one day, while he sits in the kitchens, a chicken roasting over the fire while he huddles over a book. “She hasn’t shown you any of that, has she?” There is something in the way she says it that makes him wonder at their relationship, at the childish insolence in her voice. 

“I am perfectly capable of reading all about methods,” he tells her, not bothering to look up from the book: a compendium of spells meant for helping crops along in dry seasons. There is writing all along the edges of this book, small, cramped words that tell a story of their own. Most of it is useless to him - he’s no use for farming, and the last time he’d attempted to help a sapling along in the yard he’d ended up forcing the thing through five seasons of growth before he had the spell under control, watching it’s blossoms spread wide into leaves, the trunk of the tree widening, branches spreading, until the leaves grew orange and red, withering and dying on the branch, drying up around the circle of the tree, only to blossom again as Killian reigned in the magic. The annotations spoke of pressing spellwork into the earth, rather than the growth, of building life in the roots. He remembered, as a boy, hearing of a rumor spread in their village by the sea. Misthaven had been in a terrible drought, that summer, and it looked to be a difficult harvest. Their village had prepared for the worst, knowing that without the normal yield from the farms closest to them, they’d have to resort to paying twice as much from merchants coming from ports far away. 

But when harvest came, farmers across the kingdom had come to markets with twice their usual load, and whispered of a man who’d visited them after the spring rains had failed to come, and muttered words over their wells, and wandered their fields, and spent a time with their livestock before disappearing the same way he’d come. 

Killian wis now quite certain that the hand that had written these annotations to the book had saved the harvest for Misthaven that year, and he understands then, what the Swan had meant about the other Chosen. None of them had been useless, but they’d all had a focus. Killian could not seem to find a single focus, no reason for his magic at all. 

The own cresting wave of his power cared little for the process, taking the journey as it pleased, with only the destination in mind. Most days, it felt like catching the sheets in a good wind, and following the stars.

He’d told Regina just that, two days before, and she’d rolled her eyes and muttered about poetic fools and whimsical magic.

His magic feels far from whimsical.

She’s a strange presence, in their castle, breaking up the routine he’d begun to get used to, over the course of the half-year he’s been here. 

Still, she’s not quite _unwelcome_ company. He has found that she irritates him quite as well as he has managed to irk the Swan, but, perhaps over eager for company of any kind, he finds himself enjoying her barbed words and her wide range of facial expressions.

What he enjoys less is her determination to see his magic at work. 

The Swan had, since the beginning, set boundaries between them, made certain to let their magic mingle but never truly cross, save that night in the storm. Regina holds no such compunctions, and spends nearly every waking moment over the next week trying to rile his magic into working with her own.

She isn’t shy about it, either. 

Her magic, twisting and spitting, curls against the barrier of his own, pressing and prodding like his had done to try and feel her out, the night she’d arrived. The unseen flames lick at his skin, and he presses back, dousing the fire as best he can. She does it often, trying, in her own, sneaky way, to figure him out, but it feels nothing like the gentle weaving of elements between his own magic and the Swans. This is intrusive, and difficult to manage, and even as he presses back with waves against the flame he can tell that their powers aren’t meant to work in harmony. 

He tells her so, after glaring at her for a long moment only to realize that, unlike the Swan, she seems not to be able to read his thoughts. It’s a relief, and a strange curiosity, the understanding that though they each share a common thread of magic, their tapestries are all three wildly different.

“They don’t have to work in _harmony_ , boy,” she tells him, and his hackles raise. She’s called him that more than once, now, and he feels none of the same gentle ribbing in her tone as he always had when Liam called him ‘little brother’.  The twenty odd years he’s spent on this earth are hardly what he’d deem inconsequential. “Magic doesn’t work like that.”

He wants to argue that, wants to tell her about the way the Swans magic had hooked into his own, had steadied his thoughts, had cleared the way for something more grand and powerful. Something makes him pause, though, unsure, untrusting of this woman and her priorities.

One morning, as he works at blanketing a ballroom in a fine mist of fog, she struts her way into the hall and spends a moment watching the way his power shifts and rolls. “Cheap tricks won’t get you very far,” she tells him, and the fog rolls darkly with his mood, electricity crackling from the midst of it. 

Her eyes gleam. 

“I see we’ve not yet fine tuned your control,” she remarks, and he turns a hard glare on her over his shoulder. There is something particularly pointed in her words, overly critical of the way he’s been taught to use his gift, and though he manages to bite back the barbed response he means to aim at her, he can see in the victorious glint of her gaze that she knows she’s riled him.

\------

Killian doesn’t see much of the two of them together, and after a while begins to believe it to be by design. When he enters a room they are both in, their conversation jolts to a stop, and on more than one occasion he’s crossed a threshold to feel a lick of fire race up his spine, and find Regina walking swiftly away from whatever room the Swan happened to be in.

It comes to a head one morning as he’s heading to the library. Regina seems to have forgotten to put up the warning ward she’s begun to use, and he finds himself at the door to the library, their voices both dropped to near a whisper. 

“...deserves to know the truth, Emma!”

“What do you know of it?”

“I know you’re hiding things, and I know eventually you’ll regret it.”

“And how, exactly, do you know that?”

“Are you dim, or have you really forgotten what you did to _me_?”

“Don’t you _dare_ -.”

Suddenly, they both go quiet, and Killian realizes with a start that he’s been using the door as leverage to lean in closer in order to hear their conversation, and it’s decided, just at that moment, to creak forward.

He slides into the room a moment later, attempting to look inconspicuous, and Regina shoots the Swan an indecipherable look before turning on her heel and storming out of the room.

The Swan seems to be lost in her thoughts, still, and doesn’t quite meet his gaze as he crosses the room. He replaces his book on a shelf to the right of her normal chair, and uses the action to glance at her, out of the corner of his eye, where she is slowly shuffling papers on her desk, her gaze far off and distant, her shoulders stooped in on themselves, her hands shaking just enough for him to notice.

He opens his mouth, ready to ask her what she means to practice at, today, and she cuts across him. “No lessons today,” she says, and despite her flummoxed expression, her voice is flat and steady. “We shall resume tomorrow.”

She drops the papers she’d been arranging, or at least pretending to arrange, and Killian watches her turn away from him and stride out the door without another word.

\------

They do not resume the next day, or for the following few, and Killian is left to wander again. Whatever had transpired between the two women, it has forced the Swan into hiding, or so it seems to him, for no matter where he searches, he cannot find a trace of her. In his annoyance, he reaches out tendrils of his magic throughout the castle, letting it whisper through corridors and trickle down staircases, and though he can feel her magic present in the castle itself, it does not push back, or curl against his own. 

She’s left the boundary of this place, and some deep part of him wonders if it is because of him. He dashes the thought away in a hurry. Though they haven’t shown any true signs of worry about the armies gathering near their borders, he assumes they must be working to prevent what he’s seen in his dreams. 

He contemplates returning to the broken tower, now that he’s begun to learn how to unweave warding spells, but the magic there is thick and powerful, and there is a part of him that understands the Swan’s need for privacy.

He tries to return to his routine before the storm, but the books in the library bore him, without the caustic words of the Swan to tether his wild reach and their debates to help him understand how to use it, and left to his own devices he’s a bit terrified he’ll find a book at least half as dangerous as Merlin’s. 

He finds Regina in the gardens one afternoon, and watches her release the spell she’d been working when she hears his approach. The hedgerows she’d been attempting to work into a maze fall still and silent, the working half finished. 

“How do you know her?” He doesn’t bother with preamble. Regina is blunt by design, and he can imagine she has a little time as he for small talk. 

Still, he is surprised when she carefully considers his words, instead of immediately responding, and still more surprised when she sighs, and tilts her head, motioning to a crumbling marble bench half devoured by the vines that have overtaken the garden. 

He waves a hand dismissively at the bench, and Regina watches with a curious gleam in her eye as the bench leaps back into order, the vines curling away as the crumbling rock mends itself. 

She sits, softly, at first, experimentally, but Killian knows the magic is sound, and after a moment, she gestures carefully to the seat beside her.

He watches the side of her face as she gazes into the distance, her eyes on some distant point, far beyond what he can see, as though the far off horizon is where she is able to pull the memories from their depths.

“This was a great castle, once,” she tells him, and as she glances over the gardens, he can almost see what it had once been - see the people milling about in the hedges, see great fountains and fine dresses, hear the whispers of courtesans and spies, smell the sweet scent of middlemist. “The people of Misthaven were welcome, beyond its gates, and the Swan was known to entertain commoners and royalty alike, amongst the hedgerows, and in her great ballrooms. They loved her, long before she became their savior.

“She was kind, and beautiful, and generous. With everything. Her time, her magic, her favor, her knowledge. I was always a bit jealous of her.”

His gaze shifts to stare at her in surprise, now, and she smiles, a wry, distant smile. “You’ll learn, soon enough, that your magic will create many problems for you. Extension of life is merely one of your burdens to bear.

Not bothering to give him a moment to let that new and startling fact sink in, she continues. “As a child, just learning the abilities I possessed, I was so certain that the knowledge she gave me would help me surpass her. It was all I wanted. To prove how capable I was, to prove that I was… worth something.”

He listens silently as she weaves him a tale, speaking softly of the family who had left her behind when she proved to be less than useful to them, and of the Swan finding her, and taking her in. The resentment she’d felt to this woman who was so easily loved. 

But he knows that isn’t quite right. He’s seen, in small bits and pieces, that the Swan has lost much, as well. 

“There were fifteen of us, all under her tutelage, all hungry to learn what she had to teach, and she never treated us any differently than any other.”

Regina shakes her head, the gems in her hair glistening in the sunlight. “I hated it. I knew I was better than all the rest of them. Knew I had more to offer than all of them combined.” There is a twist to her lips, and it gives Killian pause. He’s learned more about her here in the gardens than he’s gleaned in weeks, and this self-loathing is another facet he hadn’t expected from her. Between the long lost parents, and this, he’s beginning to realize how very similar they could be. “Then the Darkness came.”

She describes the fear, and the paranoia that descended over them all, but she skips things, leaves out details he wants to ask her about, but he’s certain he won’t get the answers, not from her. The abridged story, far from giving him an understanding of what they might soon be up against once more, leaves him more uncertain than ever of his role in this. 

Toying idly with a rose creeping through the bushes beside her, she continues on with her story. It’s as frustrating as it is fascinating, the way she weaves the tale, names and places left to the imagining as she describes the way the kingdom, and the realm, fell into chaos. He’s heard bits and pieces of this story, over the years, always embellished, always differing in the details. Peace with their neighboring countries had been lost, as it’s rulers learned of the power of the Darkness, until they were all corrupted by it. Camelot, a far stronger country than Misthaven at the time, had declared all out war, and their armies had burned whole villages to the ground in their reach for the power of the Darkness. 

And yet, none of them had understood it, really. Even now, knowing what he knew of it, he could not say for certain he could explain what this corruption truly was.

“The battle finally reached our castle. By then Emma had given us every bit of knowledge she could, but we were young, and inexperienced, and eager to please her. Eager to make names of ourselves, to stand proudly beside her as protectors of the realm. To decimate our enemy and emerge victorious from the ashes.

“It was what the Darkness wanted. It wanted us to destroy each other. Emma was the only one among us who really understood that, and she’d tried, over the course of those months of battles, to reach a peace with Camelot. She tried to reason with the king, attempted to speak with the sorcerers who held sway over him, but they were all too drunk on the idea of the power they might obtain.”

Killian is suddenly quite sure he does not want to hear the end of this tale, but he sits still and silent beside her, and forces himself to listen. There is a reason she is telling him this. Perhaps it is a warning, perhaps a lesson; with the threat of another war with Camelot upon them, there is a reason for this tale. 

“Camelot, of course, had their own magicians - none so powerful as Merlin had been, but powerful all the same, and with the strength of the Darkness’ corruption in them, they were merciless. We’d gathered in the great hall, warding the doors, all of us ready to finish this battle and begin anew.”

He thinks, now, of the gaping maw of the stone floor, of the burn marks along the walls, of the chandelier barely hanging on, broken, from the high ceiling. A terrible wash of understanding settles over him. 

“They didn’t even need to open the doors. Their power, combined, was greater than all of the Swan’s disciples could withstand.”

“Except for you.”

Her gaze turns sharply to meet his own, and though she sheds no tears, he can see the gleam of loss in it, all the same. 

“I wasn’t there,” she admits, softly, and he knows in an instant that whatever piece she’s leaving out is one of great importance. Her story, however, is at an end. They sit in silence, for a long time, while Killian thinks of all this place must have been, once. It is difficult to imagine the woman beside him, young and ambitious; difficult to imagine the people of this kingdom enjoying their time here; but most difficult of all is to imagine the Swan welcoming the people of Misthaven with open arms, of taking children with magic under her wing. 

It must have been an extraordinary sight. 

Now he stares at the misshapen gardens, the crumbling battlements, the wood crowding in through the main archway of the walls surrounding it all, and imagines that as the Swan had let this happen to the castle, she’d instead constructed towers and moats and walls around herself. 

\------

Regina spends little time with him, regardless of her desire to see his magic at work. She disappears down the staircase to the laboratory often, her heels clicking against the stone as her firelight fades from view, and she finds the library to be stuffy and encroaching. Not that they would often meet there, either. Without the Swan in the castle he dreads the place, and goes out of his way to avoid it when possible, instead using his empty afternoons to walk the yard and the battlements, patching holes in the walls and walkways where he can, summoning up heavy riptides to bring order to the chaos of the gardens. 

He can’t imagine the Swan will appreciate his efforts, when she returns, but that only makes him more eager to do it, if only to see the way her chest heaves when she sighs at him.

If someone had told him, his first few weeks in the tower, that he’d avoid new company and desire little more than the Swan’s biting words, he’d have laughed in their face, but he does not dwell on this new facet of his opinion of the woman. 

He will need her, in the months to come, just as surely as she will need him. If, indeed, there is to be a war, he has no doubt she will be able to teach him far more than Regina could. 

The dreams do not stop. Regina had offered to brew him a potion for dreamless sleep, and though he’d taken her up on it, since she’d finished it it has sat at his bedside, untouched. The Swan had made clear that his dreams were not set in stone, and yet, scenes come to him in flashes so real he feels the wind on his face and the beat of the sun on his back, and perhaps, if he sees enough, he will be able to piece together a story.

It gives him little comfort. Since the night of Regina’s arrival, he has seen battles, and storms, and bracing winds, he has seen men he does not know dying in fields he has never been, seen shining bright castle walls and flickering firelight bouncing off of faces he has no recollection of, but he has not seen Liam again.

He’s been away from Liam before, of course. They’ve taken places on different ships, in times past, without the surety of knowing when they would see each other again, but the unease creeps deeper and deeper into his heart now, the longer he is away from his brother. 

The dreams are not always of some nebulous future, either. There are times he’ll open his eyes in his dark room, his mothers laughter still ringing in his ears, feeling the brush of brambles against his fingers as he rustles through the forest of his childhood, a smile that is familiar around the edges of a face he can never quite see. On occasion he’s seen flashes of places and people he thinks he should know, only to have the shape of them float away the moment he awakens. 

He wakes from these dreams with a sense of loss, and a confusing frustration.

As always, in his vexation, he turns to books, first in his study, and then, finding nothing useful there, in the library.

It’s two days before he finds anything worth his time. A small book, tucked in behind a dark and grim looking beastiary, written in a whimsical hand, speaks of dreamwalking, of tethering the waking mind to the walkabouts of his slumbering thoughts. (It speaks warningly of the need for a partner to use such a spell, so as not to get lost, but he ignores it against his better judgement, and waits until Regina has retired for the evening to scrounge up the supplies for it in the laboratory.)

He lays the valerian root, peppermint, devil’s weed, and mugwort all out on the table in his study, and sets about preparing himself for bed, stripping to his shift, pulling the curtains closed around his windows, settling his moonlight lamps around the edges of his bed, sending his tide spell over the side of the tower, before returning once more to them. The book had suggested if he used any single one of the plants in a tea they would allow him some control over his mind as he slept, but each of them had offered slightly different variations on the kind of lucid dreaming he could do, and the Swan’s stores had been missing the one plant that might offer him a more clear view of his dreams, so instead he’d chosen to use all the ones she had available. 

Rather than stirring them all into a tea, the book had noted that he might use them in a medicine bag - just tie them off together and tuck the mixture under his pillow, and they’d work just as he wanted them to. He couldn’t imagine any amount of peppermint could mask the heavy odor and thus the foul taste of the other plants, so medicine bag it was. 

When he is done, he takes a final look around his rooms, before waving his hand to the door, watching the fine lines of the warding he’d been working on seep into the wood, and tucking the tied together leaves and flowers beneath his feather pillow, he pulls the coverlet up over his shoulders and closes his eyes.

\------

_The world around him shimmers, glistening at the edges, like waking to the sun in his eyes, and he blinks, hoping to adjust to the strangeness of it, but it does not abate. Still, there is a strange sense of understanding here; he is in his own mind, and aware of it._

_Time moves strangely, here, taking him from place to place, memory to memory, with no real care for the journey to get there, and images flash before him - the slatted roof over his head as a child waking from sleep, the glimmer of sunlight shifting through a window, the heavy odor of fish at the market, the curl of Liam’s smile and the sound of Killian’s own name, spoken soft and warm from his mothers lips, the pleasant drift and tangle of the Swan’s earthen magic settling beneath the swell of his own, the unpleasant burn of Silver’s rum passing his lips for the first time, the sight of blood on his hands as a blade clatters to the deck._

_Killian blinks, attempting to banish the sight, and when he opens his eyes again he is standing in a clearing._

_The Swan is staring back at him. It is dark in the forest where they stand, but in the glimmering edges of his periphery he can see a field of flowers._

_“I didn’t abandon you,” he hears, as though from a distance, and he can see her face fall, see her open her mouth to respond but -_

_He is aboard Liam’s ship, and the men are all laughing, while Killian stands beside his brother, but it is all wrong, Liam is wearing all blue, and -_

_His mothers breath comes in sharp and quick, her face pale and her voice soft as she whispers along to the song being sung below them, and he can feel his magic being sapped from him, can see the hazy image of a woman on the other side of mothers bed, and he knows if he tries hard enough, he can save her, can save the person who loves him more than anything else in this world, but he is so weak and -_

_“Emma!” he hears, and it is the same as before, echoing and distant, but this time he recognizes his own voice. He cannot see her, though, and casts about wildly, terrified -_

_There is a boy at the edge of the stream, and beside him the Swan. She holds a small flower in her hand, reaching it out towards him, and with a small grin in her direction he rolls his hand over the blossom and watches its petals close in on themselves, and then whirl open again. The boy barks out delighted laughter, and the Swan smiles, her eyes glistening._

_“Let’s go home,” the Swan says, but Killian does not see the Swan, he sees Emma, Emma, who he knew before, Emma who lead him through the woods and took him on adventures and understood him and -_

_“Please,” he says, and the Swan shakes her head, tears in her eyes, a hand reaching out to touch his face -_

_Swirling darkness surrounds him, spinning and whipping, lashing at his skin, and he can’t tell where it is, where it’s going, what it’s purpose is, only -_

_“Killian!” Liam cries, blood on his hands and shock in his gaze, as Killian presses the sword deeper into his brothers flesh._

He wakes with a gasp.

“If I didn’t think you’d enjoy the challenge too much, I’d lock you in a dungeon cell every time I had to leave this place for more than an hour,” the Swan says as she stares dourly at him, holding the bundle of herbs up for him to see. She’s drawn a curtain open, letting in soft moonlight and a bracing breeze, and though she looks pale and drawn, she sits rigid-backed and annoyed.

“Liam -!”

“Your brother is fine. I’ve been to see him.”

Killian blinks, unsure how to react to such news. Why hadn’t she taken him with her? What if she had taken him with her? Would his vision have come to pass?

“It wasn’t my intent to seek him out. I had more pressing matters, as you well know. But in the interest of your continued sanity, I made an extra stop. He bid me give you this,” she tells him, and he presses himself up against the headboard, reaching for the scroll she holds out. She is careful not to touch him as the scroll passes hands.

The dream is still vivid in his mind, his brothers warm blood still burning his hands as he curls a fist around the scroll to hide his shaking.

She sighs, holding his gaze carefully. “What book did you take this idiocy from?” she asks, after a beat, and Killian wonders why he’d ever for a moment missed her.

She’s maddening.

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“There’s a reason the suggested method of use is a tea. Using only _one_ of these plants. It wasn’t prophecy you saw. It was hallucinations.”

He wants to disagree, wants to tell her that they felt like memory, but her expression will brook no argument from him. And frankly, he wishes he could take her at her word, if only to get that last vision out of his mind.

“Take some time with your brothers words, and get some sleep. We have much to do in the morning.” 

She unfurls and stands, vanishing the chair she’d been sitting on as she does, and stands for a moment, unsure, beside his bed, looking down at him as though preparing to speak.

Instead she shakes her head and bids him goodnight before vanishing in a plume of smoke. Apparently they are done pretending she has any use for doors.

He unrolls the parchment in his hands with still shaking limbs, and lets one of his lamps hover close above his head before beginning to read, swallowing heavily at the sight of his brothers messy hand.

_Killian -_

_There is much I wish I could say, but not nearly enough time to do so, so I will be brief. Though I know it means little to you, I am proud to say my brother has found a place in the Swan’s tower. The crew is well, though certainly more rambunctious without you to keep them in check._

_The Swan has recommended we abandon Murtagh’s business ventures, and though I cannot see why she should find a simple business transaction with Camelot to be an issue, she gave us a new bearing, and a different purpose. She informs me you will understand the reasoning, and that is enough for me._

_I remain as dashing and humble as ever._

_Liam_

_P.S. I will expect the safe return of mothers ring, when the time comes. And the return of my little brother too, of course._

Killian rereads the letter more times than he can count, basking in the words, in the way he can hear his brothers voice in every line. He spares a moment to be thankful for the Swan, who, for some reason, has seen fit to draw The Jewel away from impending war, and who seemed to understand the importance of this small act. 

Eventually, his body loosens, the anxious sweat of the dream cooling on his skin, and he falls into a light slumber, waking only as the sun crests the edge of his window sill, far above the horizon.   



	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Swan’s return heralds the beginning of battle plans. Killian ponders the origin of his losses

The small study in his chambers provides a look into those who have come before him - over time, the books and scrolls left in that particular room have accumulated, left behind by those who have done their time and returned to their old world without ever having done more than learn a few useful tricks to make their lives a little easier.

There are annotations in books, and rolls of parchment depicting new methods and descriptions of magic he grasps the concept of, if not the execution. There are symbols of spellwork and grimoires and even journals left behind. 

In weeks past, he’d taken comfort in flipping through them, discovering glimpses in them of people who’d lived the life he now found himself in, learning of the names on the pages ahead of his own, his brothers and sisters in this shared well of power. Some of the script was fine and curling, weaving together intricate stories, others were short and simple, telling only spare details of life lived in solitude, so far apart from the rest of the world. 

There’d been duchesses, and farmers, and barkeeps, high lords and paupers, and they’d all spent their time secluded and alone save for the lessons the Swan gave them. Some had been curious about her, about the castle, about the true reason for their truly being there. Others had simply been content with the knowledge that their Choosing set them apart from the rest of Misthaven. They had been young and old, rich and poor, confused and satisfied, but all of them had been very much alone.

None of them had ever truly gotten to know the Swan. As far as he could tell, none had ever even learned her name.

One passage, written in a spidery, cramped hand, stuck out particularly to him.

_Today marks my fifth year in the Swans castle, and I find myself understanding less and less why I am here. They say she is beautiful and fearsome, and in so much as that is true, I can see a vulnerability in her. She tries to hide it, and usually succeeds, but when she returns from the Tower she is quiet, and forlorn. Though she is often driven to fits of nostalgia, she never shares them, and it is only when she returns from there that it is easy to see. In those rare moments, she seems almost lonely, and her words are sharp, her lessons short, until she recovers from her melancholy, and becomes once again the impenetrable beast she has come to be known as._

_I have made no further attempts at discovering what secrets she keeps there. The spellwork is strong and old, the warding so complicated I fear it must have taken decades to build, steeped in shadowy magic I cannot seem to grasp at, no matter how I try._

_It is fitting, I think, that the Tower should be her place of refuge in this empty place, for she is just like it - broken and inviolable. There is something in her that is mangled and rent, no matter how she tries to hide it, and I fear with each day spent with her she loses what little is left of her humanity. One day I expect she will be as stone. I can only hope I am not here to see that day._

As he sweeps through the corridors, pulling at the collar of his jacket to warm himself, he cannot help but wonder how long ago this particular passage had been written. He has seen much of the same in the Swan, but there is something else that lurks behind her eyes now, something that forces him to challenge those assumptions of her humanity. She is not without feeling, not without soulful introspection. 

She is not the unfeeling monster in that journal.

The library is bathed in the dappled sunlight of her lamps when he enters to find Regina and the Swan both bent over the table that is usually in disarray. It is a surprise to see the lights - in the weeks she’d been gone the castle had more often than not been lit by Regina’s more familiar torchlight, and it is somewhat jarring to his senses. 

Regina, in all her usual splendor, is bent over what looks to be a mirror, while the Swan stands across from her, watching the ornately framed looking glass with concern etched across her face.

They both glance up at him when he enters, but surprisingly the Swan waves him closer. 

He comes to her side, ignoring the uptick of Regina’s eyebrow at their proximity, his shoulder nearly touching hers as he turns his gaze to the mirror. 

The night before, he’d seen something in her she’s shown him only once before, and it has raised her in his estimation in leaps and bounds. No matter what she said about her concern for his tenuous tether to sanity, he knows, deep in his bones, that going to Liam had been an act of kindness. It means more than she can ever know. 

Regina breaks the silence.

“The king sent a patrol to the eastern border after you met with him,” she says, eyes lifting momentarily to the Swan. Beside him, she grimaces. “I assume you advised him against such an act of provocation, but we all know he’s hungry for glory.”

Killian keeps his thoughts to himself on that. He and his brother had once yearned to prove their worth to the kingdom, but they’d quickly learned all that it’s current ruler was willing to do to build up his renown. 

“He’s been taken by the corruption,” the Swan tells them both, and the tense set of her shoulders tells him there is more to the story than that. “I fear you may have been wrong to believe him when he told you he had no knowledge of why Camelot has raised arms against us. He may be a fool, but he has always been keen to prove that Camelot will never return to it’s former glory. He’s never wanted anything more than to remind the world that Misthaven nearly destroyed it, once.”

“Unhappily for us, he’s forgotten the cost.”

Killian watches the Swan out of the corner of his eye, following the roll of her shoulders against the stretch of her coat, the way she tugs her bottom lip into her mouth before she speaks. “He never cared about the cost.”

Regina’s eyes flash. “And I suppose I’m to blame for that?”

The room, already warm, feels stifling as the two women stare across the length of the table at each other, and Killian closes his eyes against the onslaught of barely suppressed magic, heat scorching across his face as wind and earth build and well beside him. 

It’s an odd game they play at, this tenuous truce so fraught with bad blood between them, and though his desire to know their past still sits in the back of his mind, he is more concerned in the moment that the two of them will somehow manage to destroy the castle if left to their petty arguments. 

The Swan sighs beside him, the heavy, grasping vines of her magic drawing back as she shoots him a curious look, and in his mind’s eye, he forms the thought specifically for her. _You’re welcome._

Her eyes roll skyward, and her gaze darts away from him. “Of course it’s not your fault, Regina. He’s weak, and he’s lived with peace his whole life.”

“What a _wretched_ existence for him.” Killian finds it increasingly difficult to understand how it is this woman is an advisor to the king, when she so clearly despises him.

He expects to see the Swan’s hackles raise once more, but her face has turned stony and still, her body sturdy and calm. Her left hand drifts over the surface of the table to the mirror, and a moment later the surface of it bubbles and shifts, until he is staring into it’s depths not at his own face before the backdrop of the high vaulted ceiling, or the reflection of the women with him, but instead into a dark night.

It’s a village, out to the east where the trees are younger and the people are poorer, and against a sky of stars it is aflame.

The metallic clash of swords rents the night air, grunts of pain and screams of terror following behind the crackling flame as the cottages are devoured by fire. 

The Swan and Regina watch the village destroyed in silence, their expressions blank and their bodies still, but Killian cannot help the swelling sense of panic that grows within him as knights in fine shining armor chase down fleeing villagers. A child cries for his mother, and Killian’s hands clench at his sides, tearing his gaze away from the scene. His breathing is heavy as he stares in astonishment at the blank faces of his companions, but the fighting continues in the mirror below, and hearing the chaos without seeing it is somehow worse. He forces his eyes back to the mirror.

In the darkness, it is difficult to make out faces, but the armor of the knights gleams against the flames, and he can clearly make out the four dragons emblazoned across the crest of Camelot.

The child from before screams, louder and louder until suddenly he goes silent, and Killian darts his gaze away even as the Swan waves a hand over the mirror, and the library fades back into silence.

He swallows in disgust - at the scene he has just witnessed, at the careless violence of the soldiers, at the collected features of two women who have lived this nightmare once before.

The Swan’s voice is even when she speaks, and Killian resists the urge to turn on his heel and leave the both of them to their fate. He has no wish for allies who can’t be bothered to drudge up _some_ sympathy, even feigned, for the amount of death they’ve just witnessed.

“That was five days ago, along the border,” she tells them. “The memory is from the only survivor.”

“The boy?” Regina blurts, and Killian’s eyes jump to glance at her. There is little to see in her expression other than the pinch of her brow, but it is enough to realize she is as affected as he is.

The Swan purses her lips, and jerks her head, and they all fall silent for a moment.

“You’re taking memories again.”

Regina’s tone is even, but it sounds accusatory all the same. 

“She was better off without this one.”

“Oh yes, much better for her to see the destruction of her entire village with no recollection of _how_.”

The Swan bristles. “She _asked_ me to take it.”

“There’s a first time for everything.” 

Once more, Killian is left to let his mind fill in the missing details of their past, but they don’t give him much time to wonder. Moments later they are drawing maps across the table, unable to look each other in the eye as they speak of expected casualties and fortresses that might be used, what support can be found in neighboring kingdoms. They continue on this way, paying no heed to his growing frustration, and Killian can feel the buzz of his magic lifting the hair on his neck, feel the telltale pull of power that has no wish to be contained. 

“You’re monsters,” he finally blurts, when he can stand it no longer, and the two of them turn to look at him. “You stand here, bartering away lives, agreeing to acceptable losses, while the men and women of this kingdom sing your _bloody_ praises in the streets!”

“Killian --” the Swan starts, softly.

“No! This is madness! These people trust you to keep them safe, keep them alive, and you take that trust and twist it into malice, into fear, into destruction!”

“You know _nothing_ of --” But Killian cuts across Regina as well.

“I won’t have a part in it. Lock me in the dungeons if you must. Kill me, if you think I am an _acceptable loss_. But I won’t gamble lives for the sake of a pointless war.”

“You don’t really have a choice in the matter,” Regina tells him, a hint of warning in her voice. “ _You’re_ the reason for all of this.”

It should come as a surprise, these words, but Killian swallows, and remembers all that has happened in his life - all the death, all the lies, all the pain and destruction. His mother dead, his father gone, Liam turning to piracy to keep them alive when they were young. The depth of his power, the volatile nature of it, the incomprehensible reservoir of magic that seemed to exist inside of him. 

For all he wants to refute her claim, for all he desires to rage against the nonchalance of their battle plans and the callous nature of the beginning stages of their strategy, there is a part of him that believes her. A part of him that has begun to suspect as much himself. A part of him that has always wondered if the worst parts of his life weren’t of his own making.

The Swan opens her mouth, preparing to say something, but Killian finds he suddenly has no desire to hear it.

He turns without another word and sweeps from the room.

\------

The wind is stronger on the side of the castle opposite from his chambers, and as he stares out at the lake far below he tries to imagine the sea stretching out endlessly before him.

Until today, he’d never truly contemplated leaving the castle. It had never crossed his mind until the moment he’d stormed from the library, and he’d spent the walk to his rooms thinking of nothing else. He had no doubt he could do it. No doubt that his power was strong enough for it. He’d gotten as far as imagining where he might go, his eyes closing as he raised waves to crash under his skin, before something stopped him.

The Swan was perhaps the only person in the world who might be able to help him understand his power. 

Whatever secrets she kept, whatever omissions she’d made so far, she was still the only being in this world who could match his strength. Regina might try, but he’d felt the lick of her fire magic, felt the intrusiveness of it, and he’d batted it away like a fly. She was powerful, older and better at controlling the flow of it, but she was no match for the deep ocean of his own.

Six moons ago, he’d been a sailor with a barely controlled drinking problem, likely to die young without leaving a mark on the world. And now he was… something else entirely, and whatever that was, there was a chance he could destroy everything. 

She could help him. 

She _had_ to help him.

Her steps are even and measured as she walks across the battlement, and he doesn’t spare her a glance, instead continuing to coax vinework gently away from the walls, mending stone as he goes.

She watches him work, her magic reaching out around him, still held away from his own, but close enough to brush past it, to whisper against it.

“In all my years, I’ve never seen someone so intent on fixing an unfixable thing,” she finally tells him, while rock seals itself together beside them both.

He grunts. “Even broken things are worth mending,” he tells her, and something like a smile flickers across her face, but she is lost in memory, and the amusement has nothing to do with his attempts to distract himself.

“I want to show you something.”

Killian lets his magic ebb out of his fingers, slowly, easing out of the working, and the construction around him slows to a halt. She tilts her head, wide eyes watching him curiously. 

“Is it whatever you’ve been hiding from me?”

Her throat bobs as she swallows. “I can’t show you that. Not yet.”

“Am I not ready for that, either?”

Ignoring the snide comment, she takes a step closer to him, extending her hand. “Will you let me show you?”

Every instinct he has tells him to turn away from her. To refuse to allow her his participation in whatever schemes she has planned for him. 

He reaches out, his palm pressing against the leather covering her gloved hand. She holds his gaze. “Do you trust me?”

Clenching his jaw, he stares back at her. There is an openness in her expression, and something else, too, some question in the intensity of her gaze, in the flare of her nostrils and the curl of her lip.

Killian feels his head nodding, regardless of his thoughts on the matter.

Used to her magic now, the journey does not disturb him, this time, as they vanish from the battlements, and when he blinks his eyes open it is to a clearing in a heavily wooded forest.

There is something about this particular patch of forest that is intimately familiar. The babbling stream to his left cuts across the ground and dips away, deep into the trees, and around him are bushes laden with berries, heavy and full just now, before the cool of fall fades into winter.

Here the trees are tall and wide, but dappled sunlight filters through the leaves, and as he turns his gaze back to the Swan, their hands still entwined, her image flickers, momentarily, as though he is seeing two different versions of the woman, much as he had when she came to him in the cove the night before the Choosing.

Beneath the austere face and the heavy black leathers, the memory of flowing golden hair and a wide smile glimmers. Killian blinks, and the image is gone. 

She looks out of place here, in her rigid dark armor, the pallor of her face and the bright shine of her hair so unlike the woods surrounding them.

“This is where we met,” she tells him, softly, and the forest shifts around them as she drops her hold on him and waves a hand, conjuring up an image of days past.

Ghostly figures settle near the bed of the stream, a young boy with dark hair and bright eyes glancing up at a different Swan than the one standing beside Killian. She is in muted tones, a long flowing dress and a heavy draping cloak, her hair loose and free as she bends down next to the boy.

Killian feels a flicker of memory. He’d gone into the woods alone, looking for a gift for his mother, no real destination in mind, and he’d become lost in the trees, until he’d stumbled on this very clearing.

She’d… 

He focuses his mind, trying to draw the memory out clearly.

She’d been there, standing by the edge of the water, and when she’d looked at him he’d felt ancient. And then she’d smiled, and asked him his name, and Killian, so used to the people in his own village shying away from him, whispering about him as he passed by - Killian had been charmed by her kind smile and gentle laughter.

The spectres near the water laugh and grin, and as Killian watches, the boy holds a hand over a flower in the Swans cupped palm. The blossoms swirl closed in her grasp, and then fold open again, and the boy laughs delightedly, glancing up at the new friend he’s made, elated to see her looking at him in something other than fear and distrust. 

She looks back, and though he hadn’t seen it then, he sees it now. Pain. Behind her soft smile her eyes were glimmering with unshed tears.

“You were a sweet boy,” the Swan says beside him, and his younger self fades away. “So keen to learn, so happy to share your joy.”

“You were _miserable_.” It’s more of a question than he means it to be, but she shakes her head.

“I’ve lived a long time. He - you - all of it was a reminder of the things I’ve lost.”

He thinks of the apprentices Regina had spoken of, but beside him, the Swan shoots him a startled glance. He presses back against the intrusion on his mind, and she looks almost sheepish as she turns away from him. 

“How often did we meet?”

“Often enough,” she tells him, infuriatingly vague as her fingers slip through the heavy branches of a bush, stepping over a rotting log towards the bank of the stream.

It’s a fine memory, and he understands it as the olive branch it is, but he does not truly know why it is she’s showing him this now. It does not explain his magic, it does not explain why she’d left him the night of the last Choosing. It does not explain all the things that have gone wrong since he first met her.

Her whole body tilts towards him, her gaze meeting his. “Have you ever been beyond this realm?”

He’s heard before of other realms, of places out of reach by land or by sea, but they’ve faded in memory over time, all the people who’d once been able to do such a thing lost long ago. He shakes his head. 

“There are thousands of them to choose from, if you have the means. Most of them are long gone. Before the giants died out, they grew beans capable of allowing anyone to travel between the veils. There were enchanted objects capable of the journey, and dark spellwork that could take you.”

“And where have you gone?”

Her smile is soft and distant, and her answer is as infuriatingly ambiguous as always. “Here and there.”

“Why are you telling me this?” he finally asks, as she bends to the stream, reaching for a smooth rock along the shoreline. 

She skips the rock across, her magic pushing the stone much farther than her arm could send it. “I thought you might like some time away from the castle.”

“But why here?”

“Things were...more simple, here.”

“I was a _child_. Of course they were more simple.”

He thinks again of the passage in the journal, sitting at the small table in his study, as she casts her gaze downward, her mouth pulling into a thin line. 

“Why was Regina not with your other students, when Camelot made siege on the castle?”

He’d meant to shock her with the knowledge, but she tilts her head back and watches the breeze sift through the leaves high above them, pulling in a deep breath. 

“ _None_ of them were meant to be there. I’d ask them to stay away from the fighting.”

“And where were _you_?” She opens her mouth to respond, but Killian, frustrated with her previous answers, cuts across her. “Elsewhere, I gather.”

“Are you angry that I didn’t save them?”

“I’m angry about many things.”

“Yes, but you seem particularly distressed by these deaths, specifically.”

“Aren’t you?”

Above them, a skirmish erupts, two robins scuffling across the length of a thick branch, chirping at each other, and they both fall back into silence.

Whatever the Swan had meant with this little journey, he doesn’t believe she’s succeeded. He still feels irritated, uncomfortable in his own skin, and his confusion with the reason for his being here, with her, inside the castle and without, only grows with every passing moment, as he builds more questions with no hope for answers. 

As the sun shifts to the west, they stand together in silence, listening to the forest shift from daytime to twilight, the birds nestling in for the night, a sparrow trilling away on the far bank of the stream, branches rustling around them. 

There is something musical about the woods, as the sun fades and the nighttime creatures rise, and Killian’s mind is soothed by it as the ground and the rocks and the stream grow cool, a light mist rising from the water as he watches the Swan.

Her magic is like this - the whole atmosphere of it wrapping around his turbulent thoughts, rushing and whispering through his soul until his body feels weightless and his mind is clear. Time moves strangely, both sluggish and far too quick, suspending the reality of the day.

He can see her, like this, _all_ of her, and not the mask she has constructed. Here she is vulnerable, and lost, and alone. 

She’s pulled off her gloves, her fingers dipping in the water, letting it rush across her skin, and as the sun falls low and the light of the forest dims, she glows in the pale light, some ethereal creature of beauty and destruction just waiting for something to stumble across her. 

His feet draw him near to her, and he bends down beside her, curling his legs up underneath him to stare in the direction her gaze is lost to. 

A flash of memory hits him, as she swirls her hands through the water, drawing up funnels to twirl above the steady flow of the stream. He’d snuck away to meet her, here, grasping on to the length of her cloak as she pressed through thick brambles, until they’d reached a spot not far from this clearing. He’d wanted to show her something, been so eager to demonstrate the new trick he’d learned, but he was patient as she led him on, only stopping when they arrived amidst a field of flowering pink flowers. The smell had been sweet and warm, and he’d been delighted when she raised petals from them, letting them shift and shimmer around her, and then she’d let the flower creature spin and dance across the ground. She’d turned to him, gesturing for him to show her what he’d come all this way for.

He’d focused in on an empty patch of earth, his fingers digging into the dirt, his eyes intent, and as they’d both watched, in a swirl of color and light, a plant had begun to grow from nothing. Killian, so focused on his task, had not seen her expression shift, had not noticed the moment her eyes grew wide and surprised, had only seen the twisting and twining of the hedge he built, thorns curling around each other while dark thistle rose, and heavy purple berries sprouted next to bell shaped flowers, the petals curling back towards the stem after a final push from Killian.

He’d glanced up at her, expected high praise for his efforts, to find her cupping a blossom carefully in one hand, concern etched across her face, and the flower spectre had blown loose in a shifting breeze.

The memory faded, after that, but Killian remembered leaving the clearing distraught, remembered taking a handful of the flowers with him as a gift to his mother.

Beside him, the Swan takes a deep, steadying breath, and turns her head to hold his gaze.

“They were harmless,” she assures him, and he is glad, in that moment, that she can read his thoughts. He cannot think how to articulate the questions he wants to ask.

“That night…”

She pulls her hand from the water, then, and reaches for his own, her cool palm pressing against the back of his hand. In the dim light, with shadows shifting across her face, it feels intimate and secret, much as it always had as a child. “There was darkness in your home that night, Killian. But it wasn’t yours.”

It’s an impulsive, turning his hand, curling his fingers against her own, and he is surprised that she does not pull away from it, instead turning her head away from him to hide her face as she presses her palm more firmly against his. 

They sit in silence, listening to the nighttime forest come to life.

\------

“We have a problem.”

They’ve barely materialized in the library before Regina is upon them, and she looks wild and untethered as she takes them in. The Swan drops his hand, moving away from him under the pretense of stepping closer to Regina.

“What is it?”

“Anna and Elsa have gone missing.”

“Missing? Who are Anna and Elsa, and how have they -?” Regina cuts him off.

“Elsa, the Queen of Arendelle, and her sister. Keep up, Jones.”

He expects the Swan to barrage Regina with questions immediately, and so is surprised to see her steps falter, her face going pale as she darts a glance at him.

“Who told you this?”

“What does it matter who told me, Emma, our best chance of finding an ally has suddenly disappeared because -.”

“Who told you?!”

“Anna’s bumbling fool of a husband. He was...quite distraught.”

Anger bubbles up within Killian - the man has just lost his wife, of course he was bloody distraught.

“Did he say...did he say anything about an envoy?”

“No, he was too busy _panicking_ about his missing wife. You sent an envoy? What in the world would make you do something so idiotic as send the king’s men through hostile waters to reach Arendelle?”

Her hands are shaking as she reaches blindly behind her for edge of the desk to steady herself.

“I didn’t send the king’s men,” she says, her gaze on Killian, begging him to understand what she cannot seem to say.

Killian swallows, staring back. “Liam.”

Her brows knit, and she gives a quick, jerky nod.

“You sent Liam.”  



	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Killian and the Swan come to an agreement.

Wind whips through his hair as he kicks his heels into the stone wall below him, leaning against a break in the parapet while he takes another long pull from the bottle of rum in his hand. It is dangerous, attempting to blind himself with drink while perched against the battlements, and if he’d seen a crewman doing such a thing in the crowsnest he’d have had the bosun discipline him appropriately. But in the time he’s been here much of his previous self has been etched away, bit by bit, and so he drinks, and stares into the forest below, and wonders idly with every sip of rum exactly how high the fall would be.

He’d left Regina and Emma to their squabbles hours ago, Liam’s name echoing in his ears, and while he’d meant to tear apart his study in search of any damned spell that might allow him to reach his brother, his desperate hunt had only ended in frustration and anger, his magic coursing through him in crashing waves, hurling him about. He’d conjured up the bottle of rum to help calm himself, somewhere around dinner time, but he’d lost all focus he might have had for spellwork and had instead made his way out onto the ramparts, climbed up the side of a parapet, and continued drinking until the bottle was empty.

Then he’d filled it back up.

Now he sits and watches and waits, for what he is not sure of, but in the meantime, he thinks he’ll drink himself into a stupor and hope he doesn’t tip over the side of the castle in the process.

Liam has been his lodestone since he was a child - Mother had been whimsical and fanciful, just like Killian, and Father had been...well, he’d been Father in name only, but Liam. Liam had been firm and sturdy even as a boy, and though they’d been so far apart in years, Killian had always looked to him for steadiness.

They’d grown and changed with time, but that feeling had persisted, always, and Killian has felt adrift since coming to this castle. Every vision of Liam injured or in trouble, every day without the firm press of his hand against Killian’s shoulder, every moment without the feeling of his brother at his side - they have stirred up anxiety in Killian he has been loathe to acknowledge, for fear it might bring him to this exact moment, gazing blankly into the darkness with a bottle of rum in his belly.

Until he’d come here, he’d been nothing without Liam, nobody, just a boy with dead parents, a man with a becoming leer and a penchant for drink.

Killian is not entirely sure who he is, without his brother there to tell him, and the terror that has been building in him since that first dream is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

And then there is the rest. His own barely controlled magic, the impending war closing in on them, the missing queen of Arendelle and her sister; the uncomfortable knowledge that, over the past few months, the Swan has taken the place of Liam Jones in Killian’s quest to be a better man – a man he was certain he could never truly be.

It’s a fucking disaster, all of it. Every moment he spends here is a cosmic joke and he can’t for the life of him figure the punchline.

He doesn’t hear so much as sense the Swan’s presence, but she shimmers into existence somewhere to his left, smoke furling away from her, rushing past her on the wind. 

She raises a brow as she stares at him, and he stares back, waiting for her to comment on his current state of inebriation. Instead she takes a few quick steps toward him, and climbs the rampart herself, her long legs dangling over the side as she sits down opposite him.

They make a ridiculous picture, the stiff-backed Swan in all her finery, while Killian wobbles a bit against the stone holding him steady. He barks out a laugh - a short, harsh declaration of exactly how ridiculous all of this is, and squints his eyes at her.

“What happened to appearing amidst a shower of blossoms? For that matter, what happened to the wings, and the scales and the…” He wiggles his fingers into the air in front of him, words escaping him momentarily.

Her eyes follow the movement of his fingers. “It’s a bit too theatrical for my taste.”

He huffs out an annoyed breath of air. “Then what the bloody hell did you mean by introducing yourself like that?”

She tilts her head, her hair rasping against stone as she turns to look at him more fully. “I had hoped it might trigger a memory, but it seems I –.” She cuts herself off, turning her gaze away from him, staring stiffly into the distance. “Would you prefer I went back to it?”

It’s a ridiculous question to add to the number of absolutely _ludicrous_ things that are just part and parcel of his life now. The idea that his preferences have any sway here is frankly laughable.

“Why am I here?”

“To hone your magic,” she tells him, her voice carefully cool and collected, and Killian slams the bottle between them. He’s disappointed when it fails to shatter. 

“Don’t give me the standard line, Swan. I’m not an idiot. Killian Jones, mediocre sailor, poor excuse for a sober man, disaster and all around horrendously unlucky _me_ , specifically. Why am I here?”

She rolls her eyes, so at least he still has the ability to annoy her. At least there is that. “This self-loathing bit is becoming somewhat trite, wouldn’t you say?”

He doesn’t bother to hide his sneer, or the thoughts he imagines echo loudly from his own mind into hers. A bit hypocritical of her to complain about _his_ self loathing. “You’re avoiding the question.”

“Perhaps I don’t mean to answer it.”

His jaw muscles strain as he grinds his teeth, the rush of riptide churning beneath his skin. 

“I need you,” she says softly, almost quietly enough to be carried away on the wind before he can hear it.

The fight leaves him, which is disappointing but ultimately unsurprising. There is something about the Swan when she is being genuine that deflates even the worst of his ire, and he can’t stand it, but it is unlikely the reaction will go away anytime soon. 

“If you mean to spend the evening speaking in riddles, know that any one of them might prompt me to leap off this bloody wall into the depths of the forest.”

“I can go, if you wish it,” she says quietly, in that static, dangerous manner she has so quickly returned to, and Killian rolls his neck to stare at her, stone digging into the back of his head as he hooks his fingers around the rum once more. 

“Your company is better than none,” he tells her, and by the look she gives him as she takes the proffered bottle from his hands, she doesn’t miss the way his thoughts betray his words. For all he fails to understand it, he feels a pull to this woman, a camaraderie like he’s never felt before. She drives him mad even _breathing_ in his direction some days, but there is something about her that gives him peace too. 

When she hands the bottle back, he stares at it, swirling the liquid inside for a moment, and then sets it between them without taking another drink. 

They sit in silence for a time, the wind rushing over them, thin clouds shifting over a waning sliver of moonlight. The forest below them is eerily quiet save for the rustle of leaves, and even the sound of the wind is muted by the calm of the late night - or perhaps that is the rum.

Killian’s mind is making enough noise for them both anyway.

He has a thousand questions, all clamoring for his attention, and he can tell by the look on her face that the Swan is in his thoughts, as well. Perhaps she can make some sense of them - Killian is done with that, for the day.

“What’s in the tower?” he asks, when he can no longer stand the idea of her traipsing through his thoughts willy nilly.

Her gaze snaps to his, and he knows before she speaks that whatever she is going to say is going to be unbearably vague.

“Memories,” she tells him, and he rolls his tongue over his teeth. This is familiar ground: her inability to answer a simple question with an answer that doesn’t make him want to bash his head against the nearest wall. 

“Are you purposefully ambiguous in all your phrasing, or do you come by this aggravating rhetoric naturally?”

Her lip quirks on one side, and she hides her amusement behind another swig of rum. “Didn’t you make some promise you’d leap of the side of the castle the next time I vexed you?”

His only response is to yank the bottle from her hand, his fingers skimming over hers for the barest hint of a moment. He doesn’t miss the sharp intake of breath coming from beside him even as he drinks long and deep. The gloves she normally wears have gone missing, and in his jumbled thoughts he assumes there must be a reason, but the only one he can come up with is unlikely. Those layers and layers of cloth over muscle and sinew and pale thin skin are armor, and if she’s losing pieces of her armor around him… well. It’s unlikely, is the thing.

It becomes a bit of a silent battle between them both, handing the bottle back and forth, taking deep pulls from it, continuing on in stern silence. Killian is certain even without the handicap of having drunk far more than she, she’d still handle her liquor far better than him, but the challenge, though unspoken, has been laid out before him, and he does so love a challenge. He’d begun drinking to forget a number of things he has no desire to think on, but the warm buzz has made his mind cloudy, has suppressed the squall of his magic, just a bit, and the feeling reminds him somewhat of the night of that storm, with the Swan’s hand pressed against his.

In the quiet of the night, here with just the two of them, it is easy to forget how unerringly strange his life has become, easy to forget that he’d once sworn to himself he would hate this woman until his dying day. As late night sets in, he watches her, his eyes following the line of her neck, and the curve of her ear, the sweep of her cheek and the bend of her elbow as she drinks. He is not careful with his gaze, letting it meander lazily over her, careless in his thoughts and the attentiveness of his scrutiny. It makes her uncomfortable - he can tell by the clench of her jaw, and the way her eyes refuse to meet his, and the faltering pattern of her breath. 

The thought comes to him minutes, or perhaps hours later. He is far enough into his cups not to know the true passage of time, had paid no heed to the angle of the sun or the rising moon when he’d first come out here and therefore has no real handle on how long they sit out on the battlements, precariously close to the edge - the edge of the stone wall, the edge of the confusing relationship they’ve created between them, the edge of his sanity. 

“How did you find him?”

She startles from her thoughts, or his - he hardly knows how her mind works, but he supposes it could be either. Perhaps both.

“Who?”

“Liam. How did you find him, when you went to meet with the king?”

She shoots him a look that on any other might be contrite, and sweeps her hand in a strange arc, watching him carefully while he stares at what has just appeared in the hand she turns over, palm up, for him to see.

His mother’s ring.

She twirls it between two fingers, the gem catching moonlight, flashing and sparkling, and Killian, though tempted to reach for it, tempted to yank it from her thin, pale fingers and curse her for a thief, sits still and quiet and watchful, uncertain of his own balance this far into the rum.

“It’s a fairly simple spell, if a bit unorthodox.”

“What spell?”

“A bit of blood magic, a tethering object, and I can find almost anyone,” she tells him. 

“Blood magic?”

“I pricked your finger while you slept.”

She says it so nonchalantly, her voice flat and level, and even as the ire rises within him, the dominant feeling breaks to the surface first, and he chortles, a small quiet thing, and he shakes his head. It’s so completely unsurprising, really, that she has no moral qualms about such a thing, finds nothing objectionable in the practice of failing to seek permission for a damn thing she wishes to do. 

It’s too dark to say for sure, but as his mind runs through those particular thoughts, he thinks her expression gains some sheepishness.

“Do the spell again,” he says after a moment, and her gaze drops to the ring, her shoulders squaring as though preparing for a fight. 

He’s drunk, and tired, and terrified, and he doesn’t think when he reaches out and clasps her hand, the ring biting into his palm as he leans forward to catch her eyes. 

“Do. It. Again.”

She bites her lip. “I can’t.”

It’s such an infuriating thing to say.  She’d done it once before, and without his permission, what could possibly be stopping her now?

“Why the bloody hell not?” She barely flinches when he yanks a dagger from his belt, his lack of coordination nearly toppling him off the ramparts. He pays no heed to it, so used to near death experiences he doesn’t bother to pause. Pulling his hand from hers, he presses the blade against his palm without a thought, watching a thin line of blood appear on his skin, and then grasps her hand again. The cool of the ring presses against the small wound as she tries to pull away from him, but too late he realizes his mistake.

_Sunlight shimmers through leaves, and Killian can hear the beast below him panting hard as trees race past him. The horse lopes through fields and over hills, pressing closer to whatever destination he has in mind, whatever will grant him a moments peace from the demons in his mind-_

_He climbs the stairs of a winding tower, muttering to himself, knowing he’s not alone but unable to rid himself of his shadow. His footsteps echo as he goes higher and higher, and there, before him, just down the hallway, is a shuttered wooden door that will open only for him. He reaches out with pale, slim fingers, a thin silver ring gleaming warmly as it catches the light from his lantern -_

_The storm beats against him as he strings together incantations, rain slashing across his face, soaking into his pale hair, and from behind him someone startles awake. He doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t tear his gaze from the dark clouds outside the castle, but he breaks from the incantation breathlessly, just long enough to stutter out “Help me!” his heart thundering as he tries to make sense of the strength of the storm. A hand clasps his own, warm and shaking, and he draws in a sharp breath, unprepared for the wave of emotion that rushes over him, and suddenly he is struggling to contain two separate storms-_

_The boy standing at the edge of the river bank turns his head up to look at him, wide blue eyes and brown hair, and he nearly stumbles back in shock, for he knows those eyes, he knows that face, but he never-_

“Enough!”

The sugary sweet curl of her voice drops away in a haze of true anger, and Killian blinks as she pulls her hand free from his. The loss of contact is exhausting, the buzzing energy spilling from him even as he tries to pull it back in, and he yearns to reach for her again, to feel the pull of her once more. 

“What was-?”

“ _Nothing_ ,” she tells him without bothering to let him finish, cagey as ever. Though he wishes to press, he knows it won’t do any good, and he pulls in a deep, calming breath, trying to regain his thoughts, and suppress the still desperate desire to be closer to her. They fall into silence as Killian attempts to process what he’s seen, but the memories are jumbled, out of order and losing their clarity even as he struggles to hold them close. It had felt - it had felt intrusive, like a slow leak against churning waters outside, like he had been the one winding through a maze of disconnected images, like --

Like he hadn’t been in his own mind.

Killian swallows as he turns to look at the Swan again. Her posture has returned to its usual state - her back straight and her body held stiff, all the looseness of the evening gone from her. She does not reach for the rum bottle again.

He shakes himself free of the memories, tries to remember what they’d been speaking of. “The spell you used to find Liam.”

Her gaze remains fixed on the tops of the trees, far out in the distance. “I need an object that belongs to him.”

“The ring--.”

With one crisp shake of her head, she reaches out and sets the ring between them, a gentle click of metal against stone that regardless echoes in his ears like a gong. “He asked me to return it to you. Said your mother would have wanted you to have it, anyway.”

Magic, Killian thinks to himself, is a fickle thing.

She stares at him, hesitation hiding behind the false openness of her gaze, as though she truly believes she can trick him into thinking that whatever she is about to say is genuine. 

“There is a spell, but…”

Her mouth pinches as she tries to form the phrasing in her mind, and he wonders for a moment if she realizes how her carefully parsed words look, from an outsiders perspective. Does she know that it seems to him as though she’s hiding things, keeping secrets, telling only half-truths in order to keep him from knowing the whole story? Does she know how much he doesn’t trust her?

Does she know that he wishes he _could_ trust her?

“It’s a difficult one. It can’t be done alone.”

The fuzziness of his thoughts sharpen at her words, his magic singing in his blood at the suggestion. He wants this, more than he can explain, wants to feel their magic rise and meet, wants to let the waves of his power find a home crashing against the worn cliffs of her own, wants to wear at her walls and erode mineral and stone, wants the stillness and calm to mix with the storm of his magic.

“If Regina is up to it…”

“No.”

She sighs, and then, as though she’d been prepared for it, forges ahead.

“Your magic is...unstable. And that’s putting it lightly. I can’t control your power and work this spell at the same time.”

“So teach me to control it. He’s my brother. I should do it.”

Her head tips back, her face falling into sharp relief as the moon slips out of cloud cover once more.

“You could work the spell with Regina, then. From the outside, I can keep watch and--.””

“Regina’s magic won’t work with mine. She’s tried, before, but everything--” There aren’t words to explain what it is that happens, but if it’s instability she’s concerned with, Regina can only make things worse. But then, Killian is quite certain the _stability_ of his power is not her real concern.

He yearns for her magic to meld with his once more, wants to feel the hush that settles over him, soothing the gale inside his mind and allowing him clarity, desires nothing so much as to see the things they could create together. 

She is terrified they might destroy something. It’s a concern he’s thought of, too, but he’s weighed the cost, and no matter how he tries to convince himself otherwise, the power coursing through his veins tells him _hang the risk_.

That sort of speculation should concern him, and yet…

“It tastes like ash in my mouth,” he finally tells her of Regina’s magic, curiously aware that any of the thoughts in his head might have been foraged through by the Swan already.

Her lip quirks, amusement shining in her face. “I know what you mean.”

“So _teach_ me. That’s what you brought me here for, after all. Show me how to control it.”

She wavers, but he can tell, long before she says it, that she’ll agree. Whatever pull there is between them, it is not his alone, and although she has so far proven much more capable of seeing beyond that pull, she is not immune to it completely. She feels it too, and perhaps that is what scares her the most.

He’s never been a gambler -  he’s always weighed the odds, and when they aren’t tilted in his favor he makes them so, loaded die and cards up his sleeve to help him along. It’s the only way he’s survived as long as he has.

This, this is reckless, and the odds are good she’s right, and together they have the power to do some truly terrible things. 

He doesn’t care.

It’s risky, hedging his bets on her knowledge of how much he cares for his brother, but she’d gone to Liam, she’d tried to steer him away from harm, and whether it had been for Killian’s benefit or hers, she knows nothing matters more to Killian than Liam.

“It will take time,” she says after a while, her fingers curling loosely around the neck of the rum bottle, tapping out a careful rhythm against the glass. “And time is a commodity we have little of to spare.”

“In my time here, have you ever found me to be _slow_ to pick up on anything?”

Fighting a smile, her head shakes back and forth, moonlight shifting in a silvery glow over her face.

“You have a high opinion of your own talents, for someone who can’t control them.”

His grin is wide. He’s won this bet. When he turns to look at her, he tosses her a charming grin: the kind that drew bar wenches to his table in a tavern, the kind he’d shoot a fool hoping to start a fight with him, the kind he’d send his brother as he wiped blood from his lip as he was tossed out of said tavern, nursing his bruised jaw.

“That’s what I have you for,” he tells her, the grin morphing into something bordering on genuine. 

Her eyes flick to him, and then away again, and with a final, heaving sigh, she raises the bottle to her lips one last time. The charge of magic in him hums and buzzes merrily beneath his skin, gusts of it rising up against his ribs, and it should frighten him, how easily this power has taken root within him, but the rum is still hot in his veins and he is, in this moment, fully aware of what this power can do. He can find his brother, he can conjure up tempests, he can save the bloody _kingdom_ if he damn well pleases. The hesitation in him is gone; the abhorrence he’d once felt for his gift has vanished.

She hands the bottle back to him with a grimace, and he takes a drink of his own, raising it in toast to her before emptying its contents. 

“I don’t mean to alarm you, Swan, but I think we’ll make quite the team.”

He can’t read her mind, but he can see her thoughts clear as day as she watches him. 

_Yes_ , he can hear her saying, her voice soft and low, _That’s what concerns me._

\------

“You’re mad.” It’s the first thing out of Regina’s mouth three days later, while Killian is focusing on the cloud above the Swan’s head, encouraging it to do nothing more than float, white and full and free of strife. A droplet of rain falls, landing on the Swan’s forehead, and Regina gestures to Killian, her point apparently made. “He can’t even control a cloud, Emma!”

“I’ve been insulting his subpar sword skills and his horrifying wardrobe for an hour. He’s doing fine.”

Killian shoots the Swan a frankly wicked grin as the cloud settles back into calm. “We both know you admire _both_ of those things about me, love.”

“Oh, his sword skills, forgive me, I thought we were having a serious conversation, but yes, insulting his predilection for refusing to button his shirt is surely enough to keep him calm in a fight.”

“It’s a location spell, not a war, Regina.”

The woman huffs. “A location spell for the _wrong_ person. Anna and Elsa are out there, god knows where, but certainly the merchant captain is more important.”

Killian’s skin prickles, but he holds the cloud steady, keeping the storm at bay. Neither of them bother to let Regina know that the Swan has also spent the better part of the last three days hurling hexes and curses at him, undermining all his defenses as best she can. It’s a horrible idea, and Killian knows it, but what Regina doesn’t know won’t hurt her. 

He’s pleased, really, to be the one keeping Swan’s secrets, and he finds he has no desire to let Regina in on them. 

As reckless as they’re being, he has made progress, so he can’t fault her methods.

“Is there something we can help you with?”

There it is. That _we_ a spare few months ago would have made his stomach turn, but here, amidst the humming books in the library, Killian’s lanterns bobbing neatly between the Swan’s, peace washes over him at the phrasing. It’s a delicate thing they have, a bubble of a truce, likely to burst open at the first sign of trouble, but it is a start. 

“I thought you’d like to know the king has begun gathering mercenaries. There are rumors in the capital of a war brewing, and the nobles have all begun making appropriate moves themselves. Taking sides, as it were.”

“We knew this would happen.”

“Existing expectations coming to fruition make it no less concerning.”

“There’s little we can do to change the natural order of these things. This is what war does.” It is easy to remember how ancient The Swan is when she is so casually undisturbed by the prospect of the war brewing across the realm, and though it’s frustrating, there is a comfort to it, as well. 

Regina does not share his opinion on the matter.

“I came to tell you I’m going back to the capital. Whatever is going on there, we need to know about it.”

“Why don’t you just spy on them from your mirrors like you usually do?” 

Regina’s eyes roll back, her grimace comically wide as she makes known exactly how she feels about that suggestion. “You can’t _recruit_ via mirror, Emma, much as I’m sure you wish you could.”

Killian’s focus drifts as his eyes shift to Regina, the cloud he’d been holding steady evaporating into mist. It’s an improvement - the last one had disappeared by dropping every bit of water gathering in it all over the Swan.

“Recruit?”

“Yes, sailor, recruit. There’s a war on. Did you think soldiers just magically appeared?”

Killian pictures the cloud reappearing over Regina’s head, imagines letting the downpour wash away her intricate hairdo and her burgundy lip. He is pleased when his magic does not immediately create the scenario for him. 

Regina gives them both one last, lingering look. “Don’t do the spell until I get back.”

The Swan nods, carefully, and bids Regina luck. Killian stops himself from wishing her harm within the same breath, and then she is gone in a funnel of smoke.

He turns to his companion, then, and she drops her gaze from the spot where Regina had vanished to catch his eye. There is something gleaming, almost mischievous, in the green of her gaze.

“We’ll do the spell when you’re ready, Regina be damned.”

Killian struggles to keep his grin from widening into a real smile, and darts his gaze away from her before beginning to reconjure his cloud.   



	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Killian and the Swan perform the location spell to find Liam.

_He blinks his eyes open blearily, confusion setting in as he feels the press of another’s skin against his own. The canopy above his head is deep red, the curtains of the four poster set in burgundy embroidered brocade. Ashen white wood makes up the headboard and the posts. He stares at it for a moment, trying to place the type of tree that might create such a strange thing, but it is otherworldly, as though it had once been normal, until the life had been sapped from it._

_The curtains are drawn close around him, so all he knows is that he is not, currently, in his own bed, in his own part of the castle._

_His strange bedfellow shifts, and he tilts his head to look at her._

_Pale blonde hair tumbles over the pillow beside him, hanging in a veil over a familiar face, and the thin coverlet barely keeps her modest as she rolls from stomach to back, green eyes flickering open to hold his gaze._

_There is a part of his mind that recognizes the impossibility of this, and yet, still he finds himself turning on his side to watch her, unflinching as she reaches up to cup his cheek, an uncharacteristically natural smile on her face. The glittery, scale-like pallor of her face shifts in the light, a bit, and in this moment he is entirely certain everything about that aspect of the Swan is all a show, meant to keep the world outside from seeing her as she truly is._

_They are close enough for their noses to touch, close enough for their breaths to mingle, close enough for him to see the small flecks of blue in her eyes, and the subtle dip of her cheek where dimples form when she is truly happy._

_Close enough for him to hear the strange rhythm of her breath, close enough to feel the shake of her hand against his jaw._

_“What’s wrong?” he asks, eyes holding hers, knowing if he lets her look away she’ll toss off a lie neither of them truly believes._

_She shakes her head, fingers curling into her palm, but the tremor travels up her arm at the movement. “It’s…”_

_“So help me, if you tell me it’s nothing, love…”_

_Her voice is barely more than a whisper against his skin as she presses her face into his chest, pulling in a deep breath, steadying herself. “It’s the Darkness.”_

_In that moment, he wishes for nothing more than to be ability to destroy the Darkness completely. Weed it out, expunge it from the world, and be free of it for good. But of all the impossible things he’s done in his life, this is the most impossible. There is darkness because there is light, and to snuff out the light would be unaccountable._

_She presses her nose into his throat, lips skating over his collarbone, and he forgets, for a moment, exactly what it was they’d been speaking of. She’s good at this._

_“Stop trying to turn my attention elsewhere.”_

_“You’re imagining things,” she tells him, but her voice has taken on a mischievous edge, and her hand has drifted down, through the coarse hair on his chest, to curl over his thigh._

_“This is quite serious, and you can’t just–” She turns herself more fully into him, the sheet falling away, rolling towards her waist, and his eyes flick down, and then back up in a rush. “You can’t fluster me with a flash of skin, love.”_

_She huffs, then, and rolls her nose over his, before flopping back away from him, leaving a glorious display of skin he finds it difficult to tear his eyes away from. And yet._

_“Swan, let me help you.”_

_Her grin is sly and cocksure as she rolls to her side, her breasts following the movement, pink nipples standing to attention, and he admires the constellations of freckles dotting her skin as she wedges a knee between his legs. “I can think of one way to help me.”_

_His eyes dip shut, his tongue rolling over his teeth, but in the end he caves, because he’s hardly a man who can control his desire with ease, and perhaps she’s right, perhaps a distraction is exactly what she needs._

_Her lips press against his, quickly once, before diving back for more, and the growl that pulls from deep within his chest makes her smile against him. Her hands pull at him, tugging him closer, wandering over his bare skin as she sinks her teeth into his bottom lip, her foot sliding along his calf as she yanks him half-over her. It is wild, and carnal, bordering on profane the way she yanks at him, the way she devours him, the way she is desperate to slip out of her own skin and rest for a moment inside his._

_He returns her fervor, hand digging into the hair at the base of her scalp, his lips veering away from her mouth to drag across her jaw while she rocks against him, and he presses lips and tongue against her throat, delighting in the hoarse sigh of her moans._

_Here, insulated against the world in this red cocoon, the noises they make settle into fabric, building into fiery walls around them, cutting them off from the outside world. Her nails drag against his scalp as she pulls him up and away from her breast, a whine building in her throat while he follows the direction of her hands, but just as he presses close for another taste of her lips her eyes flash - he sees scales and feathers shifting over her skin in the stifling heat of their bed, and her smile morphs into a grimace, her eyes going wide in surprise as the force of the change in her makes him scramble backward, away from her_

_“Killian,” she says, but it is not the warm voice he’d woken to. No, this is sweet and sinister, and it chills him to the bone, and even as he casts about for some explanation, he watches her drag the covers back over herself._

_“ **Killian** ,” she says again, voice echoing unnaturally, and the curtains fall away around them, the walls of the room spinning and shifting, and when he looks back at her, her hair is pulled back and away from her face, her expression stark. **“Wake up.”**_

He gasps awake, heart pounding.

\------

Sleep does not come to him again that night. When he finally rises from bed, he is no surer of what, exactly, he’d experienced the night before, and so as the sun begins to rise over the treeline below the castle, he does what he can not to think about it.

He tidies the study in his chambers, reorganizes the books along the shelves, yanks the sheets off his bed and sets about using the most archaic spell he can think of to clean them, letting the tedious motions and the monotonous nature of the working settle his mind.

Still, he conjures up the image of her soft smile, the taste of her skin, the flash of darkness behind her eyes.

The more he tries to ignore it, the deeper the dream imbeds itself in his mind, and he reexamines it, thinks of the sudden shift as she called his name and he stared into her eyes. He’d felt something, in that moment, something stark and honest and...real.

_That_ hadn’t been a dream.

Her gaze in that moment had felt disconcertingly similar to when he recognized the Swan reading his thoughts, as though they were connected in some way, only this time, _he’d_ been the intruder.

She’d been dreaming about him.

The knowledge throws him off kilter, and as he scrubs stone he cannot account for it. They’ve been getting closer, of that he is certain, and he’s made no secret of his attraction to her, but the dream had been something else entirely, a shared intimacy between them, a trust he does not yet grant her, but in those stolen moments beneath the bedcovers with her, he’d _felt_ it.

\------

She steps into the kitchens lightly, none of the usual echoing of footsteps to announce her presence, and Killian glances up from the book on the table before him. 

Her face is stony, but there is color in the tips of her ears as he holds her gaze steady, and he makes no attempt to hide the images flashing in his mind - the gentle fall of her hair across the pillow, the cry she made as she arched into the lips at her breast, the way her skin had rasped against the hair on his legs.

“Pleasant dreams, Swan?”

She swallows, something passing over her face he cannot quite describe, almost wistful, before she clears her throat.

“We’ll do the spell today.” There is authority in her voice, a certainty that now is the time for them to find his brother, and for a breath he finds he has no desire to break the privacy of their life together, hidden away in the wilderness, far from the rest of the world.

It doesn’t last, and though the feeling of the dream doesn’t quite leave him, he nods his head. In the back of his mind, he wonders at the timing of it. Liam will drive a wedge between them, Killian is certain of that, and perhaps that is what she wants. Perhaps she needs him to spend less time thinking of her, needs his attention focused on something other than the curve of her smile and the sound of her quiet laughter.

Perhaps he needs it as well.

In the few weeks she’s given him to hone his control over his mercurial magic, they’ve grown used to each other once more. With Regina gone, they’ve fallen into similar rhythms, sniping good heartedly at each other across the length of the library, dining together in the evenings - he’d even convinced her a few times to return to the yard for a round of sparring. She’d joked that he’d taken her criticisms to heart, so he’d soundly trounced her as the sun fell across her face and she’d grinned at him, wicked and happy. He’s almost certain she didn’t let him win.

If he had to put a name to it, he’d call their interactions nearly friendly. In moments of loneliness he seeks her out, finding her always in the first place he looks, as though she’s been expecting him, beckoning him to join her with a bottle of rum, a glass of wine, on occasion a grimmoire she is eager to tell him the history of. 

It is a strange new facet of their relationship, this mutual give and take, and he knows it is abnormal for her. If he hadn’t already known her solitary nature for himself, the journals of her past students paint a broad picture of the woman. She spoke to her guests of their gift, occasionally of their former lives. They met in the library, passed each other in the halls with quiet nods of the head. For fifteen years, her pupils lived solitary lives, away from their families, away from all that they knew. She never sought them out, never spoke of herself, never revealed any of the things about her _he_ now carries close to his heart. It’s confounding, attempting to understand why he is different from them, but it comes with ease, nonetheless.

He _is_ different from them. She’s said as much, in passing. Stronger, more diverse in his power, but that is not what draws her to him, just as his feelings for her have little to do with the magic that shifts and melds with his. He wants to know her, intimately, fully, wants to understand the way her mind works and the things that make her tick. He wants to make her smile more frequently, wants to see her biting humor at work, wants to feel the press of her lips against his own, here amidst the spices hung in the kitchens, out on the battlements, on the deck of a ship sailing towards the sunset.

A cough from the entrance to the kitchens startles him from his reverie. “When you’ve finished,” she says with a stern look, “meet me in the courtyard.”

“Not the library?” 

Pursing her lips, her head slides swiftly from side to side. “In the event that something does not go as planned, I’d prefer not to destroy _centuries_ of magic.”

“They’re only books,” he tells her, and despite his truly meaning it, he understands the sentiment. His grasp of how best to manipulate his power into doing whatever it is he wants it to do is a skill few in history have mastered. There is a reason spells, hexes, curses and incantations have all been so carefully documented, over time.

“This is a volatile incantation. If we get the wording wrong, if we don’t tether it correctly…”

“We’ve spent weeks going over the logistics, Swan. It’ll be fine.”

She watches him with a carefully blank gaze, and he yearns, for a moment, to press back against the current between them, sneak into her thoughts as easily as she does into his. “Nevertheless, we’ll do it in the courtyard.”

\----- 

The sun has barely peaked over the ramparts when he arrives, a soft, golden hue lighting the yard, and near the place where they usually practice their sword work the Swan has erected a small table on which a spellbook sits.

The incantation of this spellwork is intricate and exhausting, or so he’s been told, and the working of it requires two people not for the combined strength of the magic but because the power of it cannot be contained by even the most powerful of magic users on their own. There are many spells like this, spells he’s read of and contemplated trying on his own, but even the Swan refuses to practice them without aid, and while he may scoff at the danger of taking risk, he’s not quite ready to destroy the world in the process.

The risk, if they drop the spell, if they don’t complete it in its entirety, is great enough that the Swan had spent the past few weeks explaining every intricate detail of the process, and then forced him to repeat it back. Any time he’d missed a step, any time he’d garbled the words, any time he’d so much as looked at the spellbook the wrong way, she’d stopped, and gone back to the very beginning.

He knows the working inside and out, at this point, though they’ve never gone through it start to finish, and he has every confidence it will work as intended.

She’s shed much of her finery, her leathers traded in for softer clothes, and he likes the look of it on her, enjoys the way the trousers follow the line of her legs, the looseness of her linen shirt. It’s more skin than he’s seen since the night of the storm, and he shoots her an admiring smirk as he walks across the yard to meet her.

She eyes the high neck of his vest in disdain. “You’ll want to rid yourself of that before we begin.”

 “If you wanted me out of my clothes, Swan, all you had to do was ask.”

The roll of her eyes is pronounced, but she doesn’t hide her small smile, as she would have once done. It’s still cool, as early autumn falls over the realm, but as the sun slides over them it will warm quite a bit, and they’ll have no time for worrying about the heat, in the midst of the spell.

There’s an eagerness he tries to keep under wraps, as he shucks off the velvet lined vest and nears the small table set out before them, both for the reality of finding his brother, and for the chance to finally, _finally_ see what his magic and the Swan’s can do once combined.

The nerves he ignores, for there is no option before him but finding his brother alive and well.

Her eyes catch his as he moves to stand beside her, and he can see reflected in them the worry he won’t acknowledge. She hasn’t said it, of course, but it has been months since she last knew anything of Liam Jones, and he knows she is uncertain of what they will find, at the other end of this spell. Saying nothing, she opens the book to the first page, and gives him a quick nod.

She’d made a deal with him - if he began to falter, if he lost strength as the spell went on, she would take over the incantation while he maintained hold of the spell itself. He’d agreed to it fully knowing he had no intention of following through, understanding that this might be his only chance to find his brother. And though he’s learned to shield his mind from her somewhat, he’s no doubt she knows this as well.

His digs the dagger from his belt, and makes a small nick on the backside of his hand, lets the blood trickle and fall onto the stark white page, blank and empty, just as all the other pages are. In practice of this spell they’d had only a leaflet of notes and annotations of the spellbook before him. Much of the power of the incantation lay in the spellbook itself, and once it was activated (by blood, of course, always blood) there was no turning back, no _practice_ , only the raw power that required at least two magicians to contain it. The droplet sits bright against the paper for a moment, and then slides into it, vanishing into the page.

He can feel the moment the spell begins to take form, even before the words on the page shimmer and solidify, and it rushes into him, taking hold of his magic, his control, his mind, just as the Swan had warned him it would.

 It is immediately obvious to him why this spell cannot be wielded by one alone — it pulls him into it’s thrall, wind and waves dragging him under, and he has to blink to focus his mind, but even as he gains some control, the spell works to distract him — he hears the clap of canvas catching the breeze, feels a spray of water against his face, and he yearns to give over to the pull of it. It is using his power against him, and he’d sworn, once he’d accepted his gift, never to let such a thing happen.

Killian presses back against it, pulling the wind into the working — the sail in his mind goes slack, and the waves go still, and the power of it he pulls into himself.

 Everything goes quiet around him, sound itself pulled from the very air and into the working, and then, as though from a distance, he hears the Swan’s voice.

As a child, on Silver’s ship, he’d often woken, startled from slumber by the sound of men above deck, singing shanties while they wiled away the late evening, muffled at first by wood and distance, and Killian had slipped from his berth to find the source of it, sneaking past a still peaceful Liam. As he walked, the song grew louder, until he could hear the words, and the strings of the fiddle, the tinny noise of the squeezebox.

The Swan’s voice filters into his awareness much the same, a song growing louder and more clear as he crosses the distance between their still disparate magic to meet her.

Killian lets the wind snap forward in his mind, lets the water flow through him like a tide, and holds his gaze on the spellbook, catching sight of the Swan out of the corner of his eye.

Her hands are shaking.

He cannot tell how long she has been holding the working, as he gathers his wits about him and struggles to find his place in the incantation, until finally he is able join her. Slowly, the world around him gains sharper focus as the haze of the spell loses some of it’s hold on him — he hears the flap of wings against air; the flutter of a page falling in behind it’s fellow as the Swan turns to a new one; the shaky breath she takes beside him as his words swell and take up the spell; feels the warming heat of the sun at their backs, illuminating the pages as the words appear just ahead of their reading.

It is...intoxicating, this spell, every word of it working to drag him closer to that heady bliss, a vice no different from the rum he drinks, the opiates the crew use in brothels across the sea, and it tries to numb his mind, to break his control, to allow the spell loose.

The curl of fingers against his palm draws him out again, and the flow of the Swan’s magic against his own clears his mind of any remaining fog. His own hand clutches tighter in the Swan’s hold, and even as he gathers strength from the connection he is surprised by the action, surprised to find her breathing evening out beside him, surprised to realize the connection has steadied her just as it has him — surprised that she would reach for him to begin with.

The sound of his voice mixes with her own, until the hum turns almost into a melody, the spell melting into song, and he is lost, then, not in the power of the spell, but in the force of their connection as it grows between them.

When last they’d worked together, it had been in an effort to tamp down his magic, to stifle the storm he’d created out of nothing, and the link between them had been an accident, and an unwanted one at that.

Now, he thinks of the way that their magic had blended, and allows it to flow into him, as he moves his own magic along the thread between them. He pulls her roots deeper into earth, imagines her babbling streams widening and flowing into the sea, the warmth of spring water greeting the cool tide. Strong winds off the coast drift lazily into the leaves of her woods, and beside him, there is a hitch in the Swan’s breath.

He feels it too, like an undercurrent intent on dragging them both under, and before he knew his own strength, he might have fought against it. Now he lets it drag him deeper into the working, allows the rush of it against his skin.

The incantation becomes easier, as they follow the words along the page - in his minds eye he sees vines winding around a heavy oak, and waves cresting near the shoreline, his power whirling in a vortex only to be absorbed by the quiet solitude of her own.

Her mind presses against the walls he’s built, and he opens to her, nodding his head even as the question passes between them, and slowly, he lets her take over the incantation, lets his own voice fall silent as he builds on the connection. He builds heavy storms above the earth, forces heavy rain to fall upon it until slowly the clouds part; allows sun to shine, and a light breeze to pull new growth across the land.

Flowers bloom under the bright sky, petals opening to the sunlight, and beside him she keeps the tempo of the spell while the undertow pulls them both out to sea.

By all rights, the juxtaposition of their elements should make it impossible to hold this working steady, and yet the power builds between them, ebbing and flowing smoothly, the violence of his magic becalmed by the harmony of hers.

Across the nebulous thread between them, she asks him to take over the incantation, and as he moves to drop the working in place of the recitation, she takes it over, still reading along as he allows her magic to roll into his own.

The force the change nearly causes him to drop the recitation, but her fingers slide along his palm, and a calm rushes through him, steadies his voice, and he continues on as she drops the words altogether. 

He keeps her rhythm, the rush of her magic beating beneath his words. Where he had tried to build upon both of their elements, the Swan calls up gales, and lets his waves crest and break, building up power between them until it fills him up - lightning on his skin and rain in his bones, he follows the words of the spell like a strong wind straight into a storm.

The world around them begins to fade. The sun above them disappears behind storm clouds that are not truly there, and wind whips at his face, rain pounds at his skin, but the pages of the book lay still and dry, moving only as he flips them.

Still, she drives their magic forward, then pulls it back in time with the measure of his words, swaying into him, and then away, back and forth between them as his heart races and his blood boils beneath skin still crackling against the imaginary storm she is creating.

He swallows against the force of it, curling his hand tighter around hers as she takes up the words with him again, the power between them rolling and crashing until he is sure it will break.

They turn the last page together, their voices as one, the feel of her skin against his the only anchor holding the recklessness of his magic tethered between them, and as they reach the last line, the storm does break, the release of it shining between them, over them, into them, until Killian cannot bear the brightness of it any more. He closes his eyes against it, breathing out a shuddering gasp of air, and then he feels the spell, the pull of it taking them away from the courtyard, dragging them into blissful nothingness.


End file.
